Ángel López-Sánchez

Associate Investigator

Macquarie University

Biography

Dr Ángel López-Sánchez is an astronomer and science communicator at the Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO) and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Macquarie University (MQ) based in Sydney, Australia. He is a recognised expert in the study of how the gas is converted into stars in nearby galaxies and how this affects galaxy evolution. He leads the "HI KOALA IFS Dwarf galaxy Survey" (Hi-KIDS) program, that uses the instrument KOALA at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) to dissect 80 gas-rich nearby dwarf galaxies to understand their assembly story. He also provides support for visiting astronomers to the AAT. He is an active member in large spectroscopic galaxy surveys and upcoming optical and radio galaxy surveys. He completed his PhD Thesis in Astrophysics at the prestigious “Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias” (IAC, Spain) in December 2006. He moved to Australia in 2007, when he joined CSIRO "Astronomy and Space Science" to work on the “Local Volume H I Survey” (LVHIS) program, performing radio-interferometric observations of gas-rich galaxies at the Australian Telescope Compact Array. In 2011 he joined the AAO and MQ combining instrumentation support, research, lecturing, and outreach. He is a founder member of the Spanish Researcher in Australia-Pacific (SRAP-IEAP) association. He is a globally-recognised science communicator, with visibility in Spanish and Australian printed, broadcast, and social media (one of the Top-100 most-followed astrophysicists in Twitter). His stunning astronomy timelapse videos have received 1/4 million views in YouTube and have been used by ABC, BBC, TVE (Spain), US TV channels, and in Science Museums worldwide. He is also a passionate amateur astronomer that uses his own equipment for capturing the beauty of the Cosmos.