Barbara Ercolano becomes Max Planck Fellow at MPE

In collaboration with the astrochemistry group of Prof. Caselli, Prof. Barbara Ercolano will work on the birth environments of exoplanets as new Max Planck Fellow at the MPE. Currently working at the University Observatory Munich, this joint position will strengthen the cooperation between MPG and LMU.

Barbara Ercolano is Professor for Theoretical Astrophysics at the LMU University Observatory in Munich since December 2010 and and has coordinated research on exoplanets since 2011, initially in the Excellence Cluster Universe and since 2019 in the connector ‘Planets and other Habitats’ of the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS. In addition, Barbara Ercolano is spokesperson of the DFG Research Unit Transition Discs (RUTD). As Max Planck Fellow at MPE, she will tackle problems with respect to protoplanetary discs in collaboration with the CAS group. In particular, she will provide expertise on the magneto-hydrodynamic modelling of the gaseous component of the discs with the aim of understanding the interaction with the chemistry and microphysics of these environments.

Barbara Ercolano received her doctoral degree from the University College London and successively held research positions at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge (MA, USA), an STFC Advanced Fellowship at the Institute of Astronomy of Cambridge University and University College London (UK). For a brief period, she was a lecturer at the University of Exeter (UK) before coming to the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, in 2010, where she is Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University Observatory. Among other prizes, in 2010 she received the Fowler Prize for Astronomy for early career achievements from the Royal Astronomical Society for the development of the MOCASSIN code.