What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I coordinate the working group that will produce the Alcock-Paczyanski and Redshift Space Distortion measurements from the clustering of galaxies and quasars of the year 1 data release. Thanks to the effort of this group, and in coordination with other working groups, the DESI team will be able to place cosmological constraints such as the amount of matter in the Universe or infer how fast the Universe is expanding today.
Where were you born?
I was born in Barcelona.
Where do you live now?
After 6 years abroad I returned to Barcelona, where I now live and work.
What do you do as part of DESI?
I have many duties within DESI. Just a few examples, I organize weekly calls that help to coordinate the activities of the different groups working on similar topics. Along with close collaborators, I have also designed the blinding strategy for DESI, which will help us to perform an analysis free of human confirmation bias. I have also worked on new compression techniques that will allow a lossless compression, from the DESI catalog, which consists of 3D positions of millions of galaxies, down to a few parameters of interest, which can be interpreted in the light of different cosmological models. Such compression will greatly help the analysis and interpretation of DESI data.
What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
Working with real data that no one has ever looked at or analyzed before! We just don’t know what the Universe will tell us when we complete DESI observations, and the moment we disclose that information and learn about new things is very exciting.
Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
I would say “follow your dream” and try to do what you like. Be curious, science is 90% hard work, but also 10% creativity. I’d say that a person that can be both hard worker and creative will definitely be a good scientist.
What do you do for fun?
I love being outside doing sports in contact with nature. I enjoy riding my bikes a lot (both road and mountain bike) and organizing bikepacking adventures with my friends.
