pablo.marchant[at]ugent[dot]be
pablo.marchant[at]ugent[dot]be
If you want to check my publication list, you can look it up in this NASA-ads public library.
Feb 2025 - Now - Assistant Professor,
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
Ghent University, Belgium
Nov 2022 - Oct 2025 - Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
Offered by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)
Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Belgium
Nov 2019 - Oct 2022 - Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
Offered by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)
Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Belgium
2017 - 2019 - Postdoctoral Associate
CIERA, Northwestern University, USA
2012 - 2017 - PhD in Astrophysics, approved with summa cum laude
Argelander Institute for Astronomy, University of Bonn, Germany
PhD supervisor: Prof. Dr. N. Langer
2010 - 2012 - Master of Science in Astrophysics, approved with maximum distinction
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile
2005 - 2010 - Bachelor of Science in Astronomy, approved with maximum distinction
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile
2025 - Highly cited researcher in the Web of Science
2025 - Now - ERC Starting Grant: Star-Grasp (STARs as GRAvitational wave Source Progenitors)
2024 - Henri Vanderlinden Prijs, award given by the royal flemish academy for an important original contribution in the field of astronomy.
2024 - Internal C1 grant at KU Leuven: Brave:Binary star physics in the era of electRomagnetic and grAvitational waVe sciEnce, PI: Leen Decin, Co-Is P. Marchant, H. Sana & Jon Sundqvist.
2022 - 2025 - FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship
Competitive 3-year personal fellowship offered by the by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)
2019 - 2022 - FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship
Competitive 3-year personal fellowship offered by the by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)
2019 - Ambizione fellowship (declined)
4-year fellowship offered by the Swiss National Science Foundation
2018 - Promotionspreis of the Bonn university
University-wide prize to the three best Ph.D. theses of the year
2018 - Promotionspreis of the Astronomische Gesellschaft
Prize awarded by the German astronomical society to the best theses of the year
Completed dissertations were I was officially listed as a supervisor, as well as my own thesis work, are available here.
09/2023 - present - Reinhold Willcox
09/2024 - present - Davey Dickson
09/2025 - present - Polina Smirnova
Supervisor of Ph.D. student, Department of Physics and Astronomy – Ghent University
"Statistical analysis of stellar populations in the Magellanic clouds"
09/2025 - present - Ritavash Debnath
Supervisor of Ph.D. student, Department of Physics and Astronomy – Ghent University
"The next generation of stellar evolution simulations"
09/2021 - present - Annachiara Picco
Supervisor of Ph.D. student, Institute of Astronomy – KU Leuven
"Stellar progenitors of the gravitational wave chorus with detailed models"
09/2020 - 05/2024 - Matthias Fabry
Supervisor of Ph.D. student, Institute of Astronomy – KU Leuven
"Detailed structure and evolution modeling of the tightest massive binary stars"
10/2017 – 05/2019 - Ying Qin
PhD student from the University of Geneva, supervised by Prof. Georges Meynet and Prof. Anastasios Fragkos
Dr. Qin visited Northwestern University for a long period during which I acted as his supervisor on his work on the formation of high mass X-ray binaries.
01/2017 – 08/2018 - Niharika Sravan
PhD student from CIERA, Northwestern University, supervised by Prof. Vassiliki Kalogera Dr. Sravan’s thesis studied the progenitors of stripped envelope supernovae. I supervised most of her work during the last years of her PhD.
09/2024 - 06/2025 - Stephanie Streefland
Supervisor of Ms.C. student, Institute of Astronomy – KU Leuven.
"Quantifying degeneracies in evolutionary models of interacting binary stars with Bayesian inference"
09/2024 - 06/2025 - Sasha Graulus
Supervisor of Ms.C. student, Institute of Astronomy – KU Leuven.
Co-supervised with Annachiara Picco.
"Mass Transfer Stability of Massive Binaries The Role of Stellar Structure in Forming Merging Double Compact Objects"
09/2023 - 08/2024 - Eva Kuipers
Supervisor of Ms.C. student, Institute of Astronomy – KU Leuven.
Co-supervised with Matthias Fabry.
"Nuclear networks and computational complexity in stellar evolution"
09/2023 - 08/2024 - Digonto Rahman
Supervisor of Ms.C. student, Institute of Astronomy – KU Leuven. Co-supervised with Matthias Fabry.
"Differentiable Stellar Evolution: Modelling Stars with New Programming Paradigms"
09/2020 – 06/2021 - Stijn van Leuven
Supervisor of MSc. thesis, Institute of Astronomy – KU Leuven
"Pulsational Pair-Instability Supernovae with Massive Hydrogen Envelopes from Stellar Mergers"
2024,2023,2022 - Lecturer of the 6 ECTS MSc obliged course "Stellar Structure and Evolution"
KU Leuven, Belgium
2023, 2021 - Lecturer: Multiple lectures as part of the course "High-Energy Astrophysics" discussing the subject of gravitational wave astrophysics
KU Leuven, Belgium
2022,2017 - Lecturer at Workshop: Lecturer for a full day at the "MESA summer school"
University of California Santa Barbara, USA
2021 - Lecturer: Gave two lectures of the 6 ECTS obliged MSc course "Stellar Structure and Evolution"
KU Leuven, Belgium
2021 - Teaching assistant: "Data Analysis in Astronomy and Physics"
KU Leuven, Belgium
2018 - Lecturer at Workshop: Lecturer for two full days at the "Simulating stars - from theory to observation" workshop
University of the Chinese Academy of Science, China
2014 - Teaching assistant: "Stars and Stellar Evolution"
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bonn, Germany
2006 - 2012 - Teaching assistant:
During my undergrad and master studies I acted as a teaching assistant for multiple courses including "Classical Mechanics", "Introduction to Programming", "Linear Algebra", "Geometry", "Differential Equations", "Electricity and Magnetism", "Order-of-magnitude physics" and "Stellar Astrophysics"
Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile
A full list of my oral presentations is available here, including slides and some recorded talks.
07/2023 - "3,2,1: Massive Triples, Binaries and Mergers 2023", conference, KU Leuven, Belgium. SOC member and chair of the LOC.
06/2023 "The Renaissance of Stellar Black-Hole Detections in The Local Group", Lorentz center workshop, Leiden, The Netherlands. Main scientific organizer together with T. Shenar.
08/2022 - Organizer of the "MESA Summer School 2022"
07/2021 - SOC co-chair of the online Symposium "Stars on the pathway to become gravitational- wave sources", which was part of the 2021 meeting of the European Astronomical Society
06/2018 - Organizer of the summer school "Simulating stars - from theory to observation", Beijing, China
2023-present - BLOeM
The Binarity at LOw Metallicity (BLOeM) survey is a large program led by Tomer Shenar and Julia Bodensteiner, which has aquired multi-epoch data of ~1000 stars in the SMC to study the properties of binary stars in low metallicity environments.
2023-present - Einstein Telescope
The Einstein Telescope (ET) is a proposed underground infrastructure to host a third-generation, gravitational-wave observatory. As part of the collaboration I have contributed to its blue book, describing the exciting science this facility will enable.
2022-present - UVEX
The UltraViolet EXplorer is a new NASA Medium Explorer mission to explore the ultraviolet sky, with an expected launch date in 2030. I am part of its ”low-mass galaxy frontier” team, with a particular interest on its prospective study of the Magellanic clouds.
2020-present - XShootU
International collaboration working on the data aquired by the Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards (ULLYSES) program of the Hubble space telescope together with complementary data from the XSHOOTER instrument of the VLT. I am the head of its working group on stellar evolution (WG5).
2014-2025 - MESA project
The Modules for experiments in Astrophysics (MESA) software instrument is the most widely used tool to model stellar evolution. This is an open source project of which I was one of the main developers until 2025, as well as the lead developer of its binary evolution module. I also initiated and curated its zenodo public repository where results and input files to reproduce published work is posted by users.