Alejandra Traspas, new research asistant at Stardust

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Alejandra Traspas is a Spaniard researcher, although she has been living and working in Europe and Asia for eight years. Now she has returned to Spain and has just joined ESISNA as a research assistant on the Stardust machine, where she will create dust from stars.

What have you been working on?

Interstellar ices. Investigating the molecular composition of the Universe to understand the origin of life on Earth.

What are you going to do here? With who?

I will work with STARDUST to generate different types of interstellar dust nanoparticles (analogs) and characterize them with different spectroscopic techniques. I work with José Ángel Martín Gago, Gonzalo Santoro and Guillermo Tájuelo.

Why have you chosen ICMM?

Because it has STARDUST, a world-class state-of-the-art machine in laboratory astrophysics.

And a personal touch: hobbies? What would you like to contribute to the Institute?

I love walking through the mountains, and the forests and canyoning and climbing. And I am passionate about cooking, especially baking.

I love doing outreach! My goal is to be able to teach and share what we do in the laboratory with people of all ages who do not have access to this type of knowledge. And also share it with other departments, since we are doing astrochemistry and astrophysics at a materials institute, and many people have not heard of us yet. As well as bringing an interdisciplinary profile, since I am an astronomer and astrobiologist as well.