ABOUT ME
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DR. Evelyn Johnston
I am a member of the faculty at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, since January 2021.
My research focuses on studying the stellar populations and star-formation histories of nearby galaxies in order to understand how galaxies evolve and how their morphologies transform throughout their lives.
My main approach towards this work is to model the different components within galaxies, such as the bulges and discs, and use these models to cleanly extract their spectra. Using these spectra, I can look for clues to how these components formed and evolved, and thus better understand how galaxies in general evolve.
For this work, I have written several codes, including BUDDI (Bulge-Disc Decomposition of IFU data), to extract the spectra of galaxy components. I have used BUDDI to study the nuclear star clusters in dwarf galaxies as part of the Next Generation Fornax Survey (NGFS), and to study the bulges, discs and lens components within S0 galaxies in different environments. I am now working to apply this technique to a larger sample of galaxies from the MaNGA Survey to carry out statistical studies of the spectroscopic properties of galaxy components as a function of mass, environment and morphology. This project is called BUDDI-MaNGA, and more information can be found on that page.
Other collaborations
I am the Survey Operations Scientist for the SDSS-V Local Volume Mapper survey, which is an optical, integral-field spectroscopic survey that will target the Milky Way, Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, M31, and other Local Volume galaxies. I will be involved with the commissioning and operations of the telescopes, which will be located at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
I am also a member of the Arc-Tomography group, which uses MUSE data to map out the spatial and kinematic distribution of galaxy halos at high redshift against giant gravitational arcs.
Finally, I am also a PI for the Nucleo Milenio ERIS (Evolutionary Reconstruction of the Insterstellar Medium), which aims to reconstruct the evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way by building phylogenetic trees for the properties of the stars. Within this project, I will help link the properties of the Milky Way and nearby dwarf galaxies, where we can resolve the individual stars, with other nearby galaxies with unresolved stellar populations.
Bio
I did my PhD at the University of Nottingham in the UK, finishing in 2014, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Nottingham (May-August 2014), ESO Chile (September 2014-March 2018, with duties at Paranal), and at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (FONDECYT Fellowship, March 2018-January 2021). I joined the faculty at the Universidad Diego Portales in January 2021.
