Paola Amico born in Milan, Italy, was attracted to "Popular Astronomy" by her grandfather's bedtime reads of Camille Flammarion's books.She started looking for "Real and Imaginary" worlds at the University of Padova, where she obtained her Ph.D. in Astronomy (1994). Her exploration of "The plurality of Inhabited Worlds" started in Leiden (1994), closely followed by a fellowship at ESO Garching. There, she discovered greater satisfaction in dealing with instrumentation and detectors than with "Les Étoiles et Les Curiosités Du Ciel" and joined the Optical Detector Team led by Jim Beletic. After building the ESO detector testbench, she became an ESO staff (1998) in Data Management Division. In 2001 she took over a position of Instrument Scientist at the California Association for Research in Astronomy, Keck Observatory, where she was responsible for the LRIS and OSIRIS instruments. In all those years, she kept active in the world detector community, publishing technical papers and co-organizing four international conferences on the subject. In 2005 she re-joined ESO, Chile, where she realized that in order to keep up with her job as Adaptive Optics, NACO and, most recently, "MAD" instrument scientist she might have to read "Atmosphere: Popular meteorology" once again. In her free time, she likes to try new, fun things (see picture) to see how it feels like.

Stephane Brillant is an Operations Astronomer at the Paranal observatory. He received his PhD in physics from the University of Paris XI in 1999. After 2 years as a student in ESO during his PhD he came back in 1999 as a fellow and moved in 2001 to his current position in Paranal. While his PhD was more in theoretical physics, he moved to more observational study and has been working mostly on microlensing. In particular his work with the Planet project involved using microlensing events to search for planets around other stars but also to study the composition of stellar atmospheres. As part of his function in the observatory he is responsible of the operations of the Auxiliary Telescopes and will act as Prima instrument scientist when the instrument arrives on Paranal.

Giovanni Carraro is a support astronomer at VLT Paranal. He received his PhD in Astronomy from Padova University in 1996. He was a postdoc at SISSA/ISAS and Padova University, and later he was Andes Fellow at Yale and the Universidad de Chile. Since 1999 he holds an assistant professorship at Padova University. His scientific interests include open star clusters and Milky Way structure and evolution, Galaxy formation, and small objects in the solar system.

Christophe Dumas is a planetary astronomer at ESO-Chile, sharing his time between science operations activities at Paranal Observatory, where he is the Deputy Head for operations and instrument scientist for the adaptive optics integral field near-infrared spectrograph SINFONI, and his personal research, which consists to study the physical processes involved in the formation of planetary systems. Specifically, he uses high-contrast and high-angular-resolution observing techniques to investigate key-questions about the origin of our solar system (original composition of the solar nebula, how did accrete the first planetesimals, what is the role of collision in planetary formation?), which can find answers in the study of the most primitive objects it contains (comets, trans-neptunians, small satellites of the outer planets ...), as well as from the physical characterization of young exo-planetary systems.
Christophe Dumas obtained his PhD in 1997 from the University of Paris Denis-Diderot (France), after graduating as an engineer from "Supélec", the French "Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité". Priorly to joining ESO, he was a staff scientist at the NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (USA) where he worked for 6 years in the preparation and development of space missions related to the NASA Origins program (Terrestrial Planet Finder, Space Inteferometer Mission, Astrobiology Explorer). He also worked at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii (USA) as a junior scientist during his graduate years.

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Richard Hills
(ALMA)

Richard Hills joined ESO and took up the post of Project Scientist on ALMA on November 1st 2007.  He and his wife Beverly Bevis have moved to Santiago from Cambridge in England, where he was Professor of Radio Astronomy.  Although he has only now joined the ALMA project full-time, he has been associated with it for many years.  In particular he has led the development of the system which will be used on ALMA for correcting the effects of atmospheric fluctuations – essentially the millimetre-wave equivalent of the adaptive optics systems now being used on Optical/IR telescopes.
Before that, Richard Hills was involved in the development of telescopes and instrumentation for millimetre wavelength astronomy for many years.  For his Ph.D. thesis he worked with Jack Welch on the first version of the millimetre-wave interferometer at Hat Creek in California and after moving to England he became Project Scientist for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, which is on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.  Although he is primarily an instrumentalist he maintains a scientific interest in almost the whole range of things that can presently be done with millimetre-wave telescopes - from observations of solar system objects, the formation of stars and planets through to the emission from high redshift galaxies and quasars.  With ALMA there will be a still wider range of opportunities to be explored!

After finishing her diploma work at the University of Saint Petersburg (Russia), Swetlana Hubrig worked as a staff scientist at the Central Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam (Germany), where she received her Ph.D. in Astronomy. In 1999, she finished her Habilitation thesis at the University of Potsdam. Since 2001, she is an Operations Staff Astronomer at the Paranal Observatory. Her main scientific interests focus on high resolution spectroscopic studies of various types of stars as well as on stellar magnetic fields.

Valentin D. Ivanov was born on August 1, 1967 in the town of Burgas, Bulgaria. He holds a Master of Science in Physics, with specialization in Astronomy from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria (1992) and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Arizona, Tucson (2001). He was a ESO Fellow from 2001 to 2003 at the Paranal Observatory, and ESO staff astronomer at the La Silla Observatory from 2004 to 2007. Currently, Valentin is a ESO staff astronomer at Paranal. His main research interests are stellar populations of distant galaxies and transiting extrasolar planets.

Andreas Kaufer is the Director of the La Silla Paranal Observatory. He received his degree in Physics from Heidelberg University in 1993. In 1996 he graduated with a PhD in Astronomy from the same university. He became ESO staff member in 1999 and joined the VLT Science Operations department. He has been the Paranal instrument scientists of UVES and later FLAMES. In 2003 he became the instrumentation scientist of the La Silla Paranal Observatory. His research activities focus on the fields of stellar astrophysics, galaxy evolution, and state-of-the-art astronomical instrumentation.

Cedric Ledoux is support astronomer at the Paranal observatory. He started working at ESO La Silla in 1995-1996 as French cooperant and received his PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from Strasbourg and Lyon observatories, France, in 1999. He was then awarded a 2-years fellowship at ESO Garching before moving back to Chile in 2002. His research interests include the properties and evolution of galaxies as revealed by QSO absorption-line systems, the population of faint Lyman-alpha emitters at high redshift, and Gamma-Ray Burst host galaxies. He is the instrument scientist responsible for UVES, the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph at the VLT, and the leader of the Paranal general operations group.

Chris Lidman is the adaptive optics instrument scientist at the Paranal La Silla Observatory. He obtained his PhD in astronomy at the Australian National University in 1994 and joined ESO in 1995. He has worked on both La Silla and Paranal, where he was the instrument scientist of IRAC1, IRAC2b, SOFI, ISAAC and NACO. His research interests center on the use of high redshift galaxy clusters, very high redshift galaxies, gravitational lenses and supernovae as cosmological probes.

Gaspare Lo Curto is Support Astronomer at the La Silla - Paranal observatory. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the Ohio State University (U.S.A.) and worked for the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich (DE). Before joining ESO he also worked at CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research - CH) and at BNL (Brookhaven National Laboratory - U.S.A.). He joined ESO in September 2001 and currently he is the instrument scientist of the HARPS high resolution spectrograph and of the 3.6m telescope. He has been instrument scientist of the CES high resolution spectrograph and supports observations with all La Silla instruments. His main scientific interests are the search for extra-solar planets and the understanding of how solar systems form, and multi-wavelengths studies of isolated neutron stars, aiming to the detection of a possible new phase of matter in their interiors, as predicted by QCD.

Andreas Lundgren is the team leader of the science operations group at APEX. He received his PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics at the Stockholm University in 2004. During a sabbatical year he worked as support astronomer at the SEST (2002-2003) and in 2004 he moved to Chile to start as fellow at APEX. Since 2006 he has been working as paid associate, and since 2008 he is a staff astronomer. His scientific interests range from molecular line emission from nearby carbon stars to dust emission from distant galaxies, but the main focus is kinematics and physical properties of the interstellar medium in nearby galaxies, in particular barred spiral galaxy M83.

Gianni Marconi is the Instrument Operation Teams Coordinator for the LSP Observatory. He received his PhD in astronomy from Bologna University in 1992; after a 2 year fellowship at ESO Garching he has held the position of Researcher at the Observatory of Rome. From 1999 he has been a VLT staff astronomer at the Paranal Observatory where until January 2007 he was also Instrument Scientist for VIMOS. His main research is focused on the study of stellar populations in different environments, as observational test for stellar models, galaxy evolution and cosmology. His research interests include: star formation and chemical evolution history of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group; age, evolution and dynamics in Galactic globular and open clusters. Other scientific interests: anomalous X-ray pulsars and high resolution spectroscopy of high redshift GRBs. Other technical interests: astronomical instrumentation and adaptive optics.

After having received the master degree in Astronomy at the historical University of Padova, Elena Mason first moved to the desolated and frozen lands of Wyoming and then to the arid and unbearable hot Tucson to get her PhD. She finally added the driest place in the world (the Atacama desert) to her "living in the desert experience" becoming part of the PSO team. She has been an ESO fellow between 2001 and 2004, and became an ESO staff astronomer in June 2004. Since 2005 she is responsible of the old glorious ISAAC which, despite all, is still capable of producing highly competitive data (e.g. Messenger 126, p.24). However, before the end of 2007 she will move to the second generation VLT instrument X-shooter: the first medium resolution spectrograph in Paranal and the dream of all SED seekers. Elena Mason started her career studying Classical Novae in outburst and short orbital period Cataclysmic Variables. Since then she believes that spectroscopy is a must and time resolution is the fun. Current interests include anything which is interacting, variable, bursting and/or requires challengingly fast observations.

Gautier Mathys is Head of the Visiting Astronomers Department; he shares his time between the ESO Headquarters in Garching and the ESO Science Office in Vitacura. He obtained his PhD in Physics in 1983, and his Habilitation in 1990, both at the University of Liege. After 8 years in Switzerland (first at the ETH in Zurich, then at the Geneva Observatory), he moved to ESO-Chile in 1991, where he worked as support astronomer at the La Silla Observatory and, as of 1998, at the Paranal Observatory; in particular he was Head of Science Operations from 1999 to early 2006. His main research interests are stellar magnetic fields and stellar pulsation, with particular emphasis on the chemically peculiar A- and B-type stars.

Rainer Mauersberger works as a Commisioning Scientist in the ALMA project. He received his PhD from the University of Bonn suing the MPIfR 100m telescope to measure ammonia thoughout the galaxy. The galactic and extragalactic cold interstellar medium remained his main field of investigation while he was working at the Sub-mm Telescope Observatory in Arizona and Pico Veleta Observatory in Granada (Spain), where he served as the station manager for nine years.

Scientific interests:

• Violent star formation
• Galactic and extragalactic starbursts
• Evolution of massive stars

Antoine Mérand
(PAO/SCV)

Antoine Mérand is an Operation Astronomer at Paranal, specialized in optical interferometry. He received his PhD in astronomy from Paris University (France) in 2005. After he graduated, he went to the CHARA Array interferometer (California, USA) to work on instrumentation developments and to complete observation programs he started during his PhD. His main interests are Cepheids pulsating stars, stellar environments and optical interferometry. In 2008, he joined ESO as an astronomer, mainly to work on the operation and the development of the VLTI.

Steffen Mieske
(PAO/SCV)

Steffen Mieske obtained his PhD in astronomy in 2005 from Bonn University. Between 2000 and 2004 he spent about 3 years in Chile at PUC, pursueing research for his Master's and PhD theses. In 2005 he joined ESO as a fellow in Garching. He moved to ESO Chile in August 2008 as Staff Astronomer and supports science operations of the wide-field imagers, especially the survey telescope VISTA. His scientific interests comprise the high-mass end of the globular cluster population and ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs), and generally the internal dynamics of compact stellar systems. He also works on photometric properties of extragalactic dwarf galaxies, such as their scaling relations and luminosity function. During his PhD time, he studied the shape of the Hubble flow in the "Great Attractor" region.

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Félix Mirabel is the ESO Representative in Chile since 2004, on leave from his tenure position as Director of Research of the French Atomic Energy Commission. He received his PhD in Astronomy from the National University of La Plata and a "Licenciatura" in Philosophy from the National University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Before he moved to Paris in 1990, he had held research and teaching positions at the California Institute of Technology, University of Manchester, University of Maryland, University of Puerto Rico, and National Research Council of Argentina. He was a major protagonist in the discoveries of Microquasars, Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies, and Tidal Dwarf Galaxies. He was awarded, among other distinctions, the Doctorate Honoris Causa by the University of Barcelona, The Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society, and the Scientific Prize of the French Atomic Energy Commission.

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Yazan Al Momany
(PAO/SCV)

Scientific interests:

• Resolved stellar populations
• Milky Way structure
• Dwarf galaxies and globular clusters

Dieter Nürnberger is Operations Staff Astronomer at the Paranal La Silla Observatory. He studied Physics and Astronomy at the University of Würzburg in Germany and, during his time as PhD student, he has held research assistant positions at the University of Würzburg and at IRAM Grenoble in France. He received his PhD in astronomy from the University of Würzburg in 2004. He joined ESO in 2002 as research fellow and became staff astronomer in 2006. He is expert in both infrared and (sub)millimeter astronomy. He currently supports the science operations of all infrared instruments at the VLT and, in particular, acts as instrument scientist of VISIR. His research interests are primarily focused on the earliest phases of high mass star formation and on the formation of stars in clusters. Since 2006 he coordinates the activities of the "star formation and (sub)millimeter astronomy" group at ESO Vitacura.

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Kieran O'Brien is a Staff Astronomer at the VLT, where he is an Instrument Scientist for FORS. He gained his PhD in astronomy at the University of St Andrews in 2000. He then spent two years as a post-doc at the University of Amsterdam before joining ESO in 2002. His main area of research is in the multi-wavelength study of Interacting Binaries. He is involved in a number of projects, both scientific and instrumentation, in the area of high time resolution astrophysics, including the development of novel detector technologies for fast spectroscopy.

Pere Planesas joined ESO on March 1st 2008 as ALMA Test Scientist. In 1981 he joined the Yebes Observatory (Spain) to participate in the start-up of a 14m millimeter-wave telescope. After receiving his PhD, he moved to Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory, specializing in millimeter-wave interferometry and the study of the molecular gas in galaxies. Back at the National Astronomical Observatory of Spain, he was a regular user of the IRAM telescopes and collaborated in the commissioning and testing of new instruments and software. In 1998 he became involved in the development of the HIFI instrument for the Herschel Space Observatory, and in the period 2002-2007 he lead the Spanish contribution to HIFI hardware and actively promoted the participation of Spanish astronomers in its scientific programs. His current research focuses in the study of molecular gas in luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies.

Emanuela Pompei is working as FORS instrument scientist at the Paranal La Silla Observatory. She obtained her PhD from University of Trieste in Italy in 1999 and joined ESO the same year. She has worked both on La Silla and on Paranal as Boller&Chivens, DFOSC, FEROS, EMMI and NTT instrument scientist and WFI and EFOSC2 support astronomer. Her research interests center on the dynamics and chemical evolution of galaxies and on compact groups of galaxies, as probes of the evolution of large scale structures.

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David Rabanus worked in the development of the GREAT receiver, a collaboration between the Kölner Observatorium für Sub-Millimeter-Astronomie (KOSMA http://www.ph1.uni-koeln.de), the Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) and the Institute for Space Sensor Technology of the German Aerospace Center (DLR-WS) on a heterodyne receiver of SOFIA within the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 494). Development of the 1.6-1.9 THz channel, local oscillator structural development, airworthiness certification of essential parts of the instrument structure. Design of the STAR receiver, a second generation instrument for SOFIA, following up on the experience with GREAT. Here emphasis on the Gaussian optics focal plane modules. Ground-based receiver deployment of the SMART receiver and servicing at the KOSMA telescope on Gornergrat, Switzerland. Deployment of the receiver CONDOR (1.3-1.5 THz) at the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX). Development and deployment of a 490/810 GHz dual frequency receiver for the NANTEN2 telescope, Pampa La Bola, Atacama, Chile, photogrammetry of the the NANTEN2 submillimeter dish. Application of new THz quantum cascade lasers as local oscillators for heterodyne observations on SOFIA.
Dissertation in the Institute for Space Sensor Technology and of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin-Adlershof. Topic: ‚Development of a Modular Stressed-Ge:Ga Photoconductor Focal Plane Array Prototype‘. This is a far-infrared photoconductor array was developed for deployment on the US-German Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) and forms the long-wavelength detector system in the spectrometer 'AIRES‘ based at the NASA Ames Research Center, California, in the US.

Thomas Rivinius has studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he got his PhD in 1998. After three years of ESO fellowship in Garching he returned to Heidelberg to become "Privatdozent". Since 2005 he's back at ESO, this time in Chile as science operations support astronomer on Paranal at the VLTI. Currently, he's the intrument scientist for MIDI. His research focusses on hot stars and their circumstellar environments, covering stellar pulsation, hot star winds, magnetic O and B-type stars, and Be stars and their disks.

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Ivo Saviane got his Ph.D. in 1997 at the University of Padova, with a thesis on old populations of Local Group galaxies and clusters. After receiving his Ph.D., he had several postdoc positions: the first one in Padova and the second at UCLA. During this time, the case of SagDIG stimulated his interest in dwarf irregular galaxies, and he started a project to investigate the luminosity-metallicity relation for such objects. In 2001 he moved to ESO, first as a fellow and later as a staff astronomer, where he's currently the EMMI instrument scientist at La Silla. He has been head of the IR instrument force, and TIMMI2 and EFOSC2 instrument scientist. Up to now his best-selling paper is the 1999 investigation on the relative ages of Galactic globular clusters. Among other results are the discovery of population II stars in Leo I, and of a young globular cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Recently he revised the distance to the Antennae galaxies, and he's getting some fruits from the dwarf irregulars project.

Linda Schmidtobreick did her studies and PhD (1997) at the Ruhruniversitaet Bochum, Germany about the structure of the Milky Way via UV studies. She took some short postdoc positions in Bochum and the MPIA in Heidelberg, and then went to the Osservatorio Astronomico di Padua, Italy. In 2001, she started as an ESO fellow on La Silla, and in 2005 got her current staff position on Paranal. By now, she is mainly working on compact binaries, like CVs, Pre-CVs, and a bit on microquasars. Also, she still does some work on Galactic structure and stellar populations.

Fernando Selman's current observational research interests include studies of the nature of the stellar IMF in several systems, and the dynamics and binary content in 30 Doradus using SINFONI. He recently found, together with his collaborators, that the IMF of the field stellar population in 30 Doradus is, within errors, consistent with a Salpeter law. In a recent project on the Arches cluster we reached a similar conclusion thus giving strong support to the hypothesis of universality of the IMF.  On a larger scale he is interested in the intergalactic light in clusters of galaxies. In the course of this research discovered with his collaborators an interesting S-shaped gravitational arc, an image of which can be seen in his personal web page. On a theoretical side he is interested in the dynamics of gravitational systems with particular attention to the phenomenon of dynamical friction. He is currently involved in an n-body simulation study of the stability of star clusters as a function of the mass of its heaviest star.
As an observatory astronomer, he has been instrument scientist for the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at La Silla, and he is currently at Paranal as instrument scientist for HAWK-I, VIMOS, and OmegaCam. Part of his technical work include the development of techniques that permit the determination of zero point correction maps in imaging instruments.
He started his career as a physics student at the School of Engineering of Universidad de Chile subsequently obtaining his PhD at Caltech in 2004. During his strongly acausal career he was Fulbright Travel fellow, Carnegie-Chile Fellow, and Beatrice Watson Parrent postdoctoral fellow.

Personal web site: http://www.sc.eso.org/~fselman

Alain Smette is a VLT operations Staff Astronomer. Following studentships at ESO-Garching and La Silla, he received his PhD from the Universite de Liege, Belgium, in 1994. He was a Post-Doc at Kapteyn Institute, Groningen, and a research associate first at the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, in the STIS team, then back in Liege. His research interests mainly include the study of absorption lines in the spectra of quasars and gamma-ray burst optical afterglows, gravitational lensing and AGN. He is the instrument scientist of CRIRES.

Stan Stefl is the Operation astronomer at VLTI and UT2 and the second AMBER instrument scientist. He obtained his PhD at the Charles University, Prague in 1987. After his associate stay at ESO-Garching in 1991-3, he was involved in many spectroscopic projects carried out mostly at the ESO La Silla observatory and focused on rapid variability of Be stars, structure and evolution of their circumstellar disks. He joined ESO-Paranal in 2004. His present research focuses on interferometric and spectroscopic observations of the circumstellar disks of Be stars and their consistent modeling.

Michael Sterzik received his PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Tuebingen (Germany), and was researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics in Munich. He has been working for science operations in La Silla and Paranal since joining ESO in 1998. His research interests focus on star- and planetary system formation, stellar dynamics, and bioastronomy, employing both observational and numerical approaches.

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Thomas Szeifert is support astronomer at the VLT since 1999. Before he was working for the FORS instrument consortium at the observatory in Heidelberg. He has been instrument scientist at Paranal for the FORS optical multi-mode instrument and the SINFONI near-IR adaptive optics integral field spectrograph. His primary fields of research are the study of long-term wind variability of Luminous Blue Variables and other massive hot stars and stellar abundance studies in the Galaxy and local group galaxies. He obtained his PhD in 1995 at the Heidelberg University for his work on Luminous Blue Variable Stars in the Magellanic clouds, M31 and M33.

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Michael West is Head of the Office for Science in Chile. He received his PhD in astronomy from Yale University in 1987 and has held research and teaching positions around the world, most recently as Head of Science Operations at the Gemini South telescope and as Professor of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. His research interests include globular clusters as probes of galaxy formation and evolution, clusters of galaxies at low and high redshifts, and the large-scale structure of the universe. He is also active in public outreach and currently heads an IAU working group on New Ways of Communicating Astronomy with the Public.

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Andrea Ahumada
(PAO/SCV)

Since April 2008, Andrea Veronica Ahumada is an ESO Fellow with duties on the VLT at the Paranal Observatory. She received her PhD in Astronomy from the “Universidad Nacional de Cordoba” (UNC, Argentina) in 2004. She was an assistant professor at the Astronomical Observatory (OAC-UNC) and since 2006 she is a member of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). Her main topics of research are Galactic Open Clusters and Magellanic Clouds Star Clusters.

Yuri Beletsky is an ESO fellow with duty station at the Paranal Observatory where he supports the near-infrared imager and spectrograph ISAAC. He did his PhD at the University of Munich. His main research interests are related to study of extragalactic giant molecular clouds, diffuse interstellar bands and chemistry of interstellar medium. 

Thomas Bensby
(PAO/SCV)

Thomas Bensby is an ESO fellow with duties on the VLT at the Paranal Observatory. After obtaining a PhD at Lund University in Sweden in 2004, and before coming to ESO in 2007, he spent three years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA. His research focus on the origin and evolution of stellar populations kinematical structures in the Milky Way, in particular the Galactic thin and thick disks and the Hercules stream.

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Blair Conn is a post-doctoral research fellow at ESO, with duty station at La Silla. His research focuses mainly on attempts to understand the structure of the outer disc of the Milky Way and hence attempt to gain some insight into its formation. To disentangle substructure in these regions he primarily uses Wide Field Cameras, as this is the best way of detecting the faint stellar streams detected in these fields. This work is continuation of his PhD thesis (2006, University of Sydney, Australia).

Lise Christensen is a specialist on integral field spectroscopy. She obtained her PhD from Potsdam University in 2005, and also joined ESO in 2005 with duty station at Paranal. Her work is focused on very faint high redshift galaxies: host galaxies of gamma-ray bursts and galaxies responsible for damped lyman alpha systems.

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Itziar de Gregorio-Monsalvo did her PhD at the National Institute for Aerospace Technology (Spain). During her thesis, she worked on Star Formation, Evolved objects and AGNs, and she participated in technical and observational activities at the Madrid NASA station. After obtaining her PhD degree in 2006, she joined ESO as a fellow dedicated to the ALMA project. She is a specialist on single-dish and interferometric techniques in Radio Astronomy with duties at APEX (as support astronomer) and ALMA (ATF in New Mexico, and OSF in Chajnantor). Her current scientific interests include low- and high-mass star formation processes, protoplanetary disks, astrophysical masers, and extragalactic Radio Astronomy.

Antonio de Ugarte Postigo obtained his Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Granada, Spain. His thesis research was carried out at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), where he studied gamma-ray burst afterglows through multi-wavelength observations. Part of his work has been developed through the use of the BOOTES robotic telescopes, for which he developed part of the instrumentation and the image reduction and analysis software. He is also participating in the development of X-shooter as responsible for the UV/Blue and VIS diffraction gratings.

Michelle Doherty is an ESO fellow. She received her PhD in 2005 from the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests are in galaxy formation and evolution, including areas of study such as massive galaxies at high redshift, clusters of galaxies at high redshift, the star formation rate history of the Universe and using Planetary Nebulae as dynamic tracers in nearby clusters of galaxies.

Andrew Fox received his MSci in astrophysics from UCL in London in 2000. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin in the US where he obtained his PhD, working with FUSE and HST/STIS to study highly ionized gas in the vicinity of the Milky Way. He spent almost two years as a post-doc at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris studying VLT/UVES quasar absorption line data, before moving to ESO as a Fellow in October 2007, with duty station at Paranal. He is interested in the observational signatures of galactic winds, intergalactic metal enrichment, and determining the properties of the ionized halos of galaxies.

Diego Garcia did his Degree, Masters and PhD at Cardiff University in Wales, working on blind, HI surveys and the properties of HI-selected galaxies. His research interests lie on the properties of LSB and gas-giant galaxies and nearby galaxies in general. Prior to coming to ESO he did a two year postdoc at the Radioastronomy Institute of the University of Bonn where he worked on APEX. His current involvement is with ALMA and APEX and in particular he is interested in the dust and molecular content of nearby galaxies.

Mark Gieles is a Fellow at ESO and got his PhD degree from Utrecht University in the Netherlands where he worked on the dynamical evolution of star clusters using the GRAPE super-computers for fast N-body simulations and on observations of star clusters in starburst and interacting galaxies. His research focuses on the relation between star and star cluster formation on different galactic scales and the evolution and disruption of clusters in different environments.

Carla Gil
(PAO/SCV)

Carla Gil for the last five years has been working in optical interferometry and its applications to star formation. Her research interests are mainly the study of ejection processes in young stellar objects, disk evolution and optical forbidden emission from Herbig Ae/Be stars. She started her PhD in France, working at Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble. For the first two years of her PhD she has been part of the AMBER team, participating in the integrations and tests of this instrument. She has worked there under a collaborative project between the University of Porto and the University of Grenoble, through an agreed combined PhD degree from both Universities. Since June 2006 she is a fellow at ESO-Chile with duties in Paranal, where she supports astronomer for VLTI and UT4.

Gaël James obtained his PhD at the Paris Observatory, France, in 2004 and joined ESO as a fellow in 2005. He is specialized in high-resolution spectroscopy, and does his research on chemical abundances of globular clusters and metal-poor Halo field stars. In particular, he is interested in studying the astrophysical sites and formation processes of heavy elements, as well as their isotopic ratios. He is also a support astronomer and the UVES instrument fellow at the Paranal Observatory.

Daniel Kubas obtained his PhD at the University of Potsdam in 2005 under supervision of Joachim Wambsganss. In 2006 he started as an ESO-fellow in Santiago with duty station Paranal. Since 2001 he is a member of the PLANET collaboration (Probing Lensing ANomalies NETwork, http://planet.iap.fr/), which does follow-up observations of Galactic microlensing events to search for extra-solar planets. Further research interests include stellar atmospheres and interferometry.

Jean-Baptiste Le Bouquin is an astronomer at the Paranal Observatory. He obtained his PhD in astrophysics in 2005 at Grenoble (France), working on magnetic A stars. He is now an expert in optical long baseline interferometry, both from the technical and astronomical exploitation points of view. Therefore, he is bly involved in the VLT-interferometer project. He also participates in background instrumental studies, such as integrated optics or polar-interferometry. His main astrophysical interest is the spatially resolved observations of stellar surfaces, looking for spots, disks, pulsations, and other manifestations of internal activity.

An amateur astronomer since childhood, Paul Lynam was awarded a Ph.D. by Liverpool John Moores University (UK) in 2000. He then spent 3 years at the German Max-Planck-Institute (MPE, Garching) before moving to ESO Headquarters to contribute to the ESO Imaging Survey. He became an ESO fellow in late 2004. His research - which focuses on the properties of giant galaxies, clusters of galaxies, large-scale structure and 'cosmic flows' - is interspersed between duties at the Paranal observatory. He is a regular contributor to English language public outreach activities.

Dominique Naef
(LSO)

Dominique Naef completed his PhD thesis in 2003 at the Geneva observatory. His thesis, under supervision of Prof. Michel Mayor, was mostly focused on the detection and characterization of extra-solar planets. In (European) Spring 2004, he moved to Chile where he became an ESO associate for one year. During this period, he joined the La Silla science operations team and worked as a HARPS support astronomer. In 2005, he started an ESO fellowship with duties at the Paranal Observatory. In Paranal, Dominique Naef is a Kueyen-UT2 support astronomer. Detection of extra-solar planets is still his favorite research activity. He is part of various planet search surveys (GTO-HARPS, CORALIE...) using various methods (radial-velocities, photometric transits, transit timing). He is also involved in the follow-up of OGLE transiting planet candidates and in galactic open-cluster planet searches with VLT-FLAMES.

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Hugues Sana is a research Fellow with duty station in Santiago/Chile and at the Paranal Observatory. His main research interests are related to massive O and Wolf-Rayet stars and to stellar clusters, that he is studying using a multiwavelength approach (IR, optical and X-rays). Hugues obtained his PhD in 2005 in the High-Energy Astrophysics group at the Liège University (Belgium) and moved to ESO in 2006 after a one-year postdoc at Liège. At Paranal, he his involved in the support teams of Crires and Uves, the infra-red and optical HiRes spectrographs of the VLT.

Julia Scharwaechter joined ESO as a postdoctoral fellow in Santiago with duty station on La Silla in May 2005 after receiving her PhD from the University of Cologne in Germany. Her main research area is the dynamics and evolution of AGN host galaxies and the putative link between galaxy interactions, starburst activity, and the formation/fueling of an AGN. She is primarily interested in near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy and in multi-particle simulations of galaxy mergers. On La Silla she works as a support astronomer at the NTT and as the first instrument scientist for SofI, the near-infrared imager and spectrograph at the NTT.

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Colin Snodgrass
(LSO/SCV)

Colin Snodgrass is a post-doctoral research fellow at ESO, with duty station at La Silla. His research falls into two branches of planetary science; primarily he works on Solar System minor bodies, and especially the nuclei of comets, which were the subject of his PhD thesis (2006, Queen's University Belfast). Secondly, he is involved in the study of extrasolar planets via the microlensing method, and through this work is connected with the exploitation of robotic telescope technology. He is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and an affiliate member of the American Astronomical Society and the Division for Planetary Sciences.

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Elena Valenti received her Master degree in Astronomy at the Bologna University with a thesis on "Searching RR Lyrae stars in the Globular clusters NGC 6304" under the supervision of Prof. C. Cacciari and Dr. M. Bellazzini. She did her PhD. in Astronomy at the Bologna University with a thesis "An IR screening of the Galactic bulge stellar populations" under the supervision of Prof. F.R. Ferraro and Dr. L. Origlia. She has been an ESO Fellow since October 2006 with duty at Paranal where she supports CRIRES. Her scientific interests are in the areas of stellar evolution and resolved stellar populations using high-resolution IR spectroscopy and space- and ground-based UV-optical-IR photometry (especially in crowded fields). Her ongoing projects include study of the formation and evolution time-scales of stellar populations in the Galactic Bulge and Bar, testing and calibration of stellar evolution models in the high metallicity regime, and hot stellar populations in globular clusters.

Irina Yegorova
(PAO/SCV)

Irina Yegorova is a post-doctoral research fellow at ESO, with duty station in Santiago/Chile and at the Paranal Observatory. She received her degree in Physics from the Odessa State University. And in 2007 Irina obtained her PhD from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS, Italy). Her research interests are focused on galaxies structure, formation and evolution. In particular, on the distribution of dark and luminous matter and their effects on the process of galaxy formation.

Lorenzo Monaco is a research Fellow with duty station in Santiago and the La Silla Observatory. He is Instrument Scientist (IS) of the multi-mode instrument EFOSC2 and 2nd IS of the high resolution spectrograph HARPS. He received his PhD in astronomy from the Bologna University in 2004. Before joining ESO, he also covered a postdoctoral position at the Trieste Observatory.
His research activity is focussed on the study of resolved stellar populations in the Local Group with the main aims of (i) understanding the processes which drive galaxy formation and (ii) testing observationally the viable solutions to the challenges posed to our current comprehension of stellar evolution.
He is proficient in the computation of model atmospheres, synthetic spectra and abundance analysis with the Kurucz codes (ATLAS, SYNTHE,....). His technical expertise also include PSF fitting techniques for photometry in crowded stellar field.

Michael Dumke is support astronomer at the APEX project. He received his PhD from Bonn University in 1997 for his work on the interstellar medium in nearby galaxies. Since then, he gained a lot of experience in radio astronomical instrumentation and techniques as a post-doc or staff member at IRAM Grenoble, the Heinrich-Hertz Submillimeter Telescope in Arizona, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn. In 2004, he joined ESO as part of the science operations team of the APEX telescope. His main research interests are molecular gas at low and high redshift, disk-halo interaction, magnetic fields, cold dust, and the ISM in general in normal and active galaxies.

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Christophe Risacher is astronomer at the APEX telescope. He received his PhD from Chalmers University with the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden in 2005. He is the instrument scientist for the APEX facility heterodyne receivers and the current facility APEX-2a 345 GHz receiver was part of his PhD work. His research interests are sub-millimeter wave instrumentation, circumstellar dust around main sequence stars and star formation in molecular clouds, from the study of dense cores formation from filament fragmentation in dark clouds to the study of massive star-forming regions.

Oliver Schuetz is an Operations Paid Associate at La Silla Observatory. He received his master in physics from the University of Munich and a PhD from the University of Heidelberg. Oliver has been working at ESO Garching in 1999-2000 and was a PhD student at ESO Santiago in 2001-2003. After 2 years at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg he re-joined ESO Chile in 2005. At La Silla Observatory he supports all instruments and is the instrument scientist for FEROS, the 2.2m-telescope and a co-instrument scientist for WFI. When he has time for science, he is studying circumstellar disks and the early stages of planet formation. He is specialised in infrared observation techniques.

Pedro Almeida

Pedro Viana Almeida is a PhD student at ESO, Chile. He received his degree and Masters (2007) from the Universidade do Porto (Portugal). His Master's thesis research was carried out at the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP), where he studied spectroscopically the fundamental atmospheric parameters of T-Tauri stars. His current research interests are in star formation, young stellar multiplicity, fundamental stellar parameters in the pre-main sequence phase of evolution, the formation and evolution of planetary systems and the chemical evolution of the Galaxy.

Benoit Carry is Ph.D. student in Chile, under the supervision of Dr. Christophe Dumas (ESO) and of Pr. Marcello Fulchignoni (LESIA - Observatoire de Paris, France) and he is the coordinator of the Planetary Group at ESO, Chile. He is working on the physical and surface properties of asteroids, using high-angular resolution techniques such as imagery and integral-field spectrometry fed by adaptive optics systems on large telescopes.

Claudio Caceres is a Chilean PhD student at ESO (Chile) since january 2008. He started his PhD at Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC) in 2007, under the supervision of Valentin Ivanov (ESO) and Dante Minniti (PUC). Currently he is interested in searching and studying extrasolar planetary systems by analyzing the orbital perturbations on known transiting planets by other unknown bodies in their systems, using high time resolution observations.

Mary Cesetti

Olga Moreira is currently a PhD student at ESO (Chile) under the local supervision of Thomas Rivinius. She initiated her PhD in 2004 in Belgium at the University of Liège with Arlette Noels as thesis adviser and with Joris De Ridder (University of Leuven) as co-adviser. Her PhD project deals with the theoretical modelling of solar-oscillations in low-intermediate mass red giant stars (late G to early K type). At ESO her research interests lie in interferometry with VLTI, particularly, in the interferometric measurements of stellar angular diameters. She began working in the asteroseismology research field in 2002 as a young graduate trainee (Portuguese Trainee) at ESA/ESTEC under the supervision of Thierry Appourchaux (Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, France). While an undergraduate student in Physics/Applied Mathematics (Astronomy) of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (Portugal) she worked on astronomy public outreach as a part-time job at the Planetarium of Porto.

Jan Ruppert

Ricardo Salinas made his undergraduate studies at Universidad Catolica
in Santiago. In 2005 he moved to the South of the country and started a PhD in Physical Sciences at the Universidad de Concepcion. His thesis work is focused on the dark matter distribution in cluster of galaxies under the supervision of Tom Richtler. Other of his research interests are the dynamics of ellipticals galaxies and globular clusters systems. Since January 2008 he is working at ESO under the supervision of Michael West.