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 - Now - ERC Starting Grant: Star-Grasp (STARs as GRAvitational wave Source Progenitors)
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.
09/2021 - present - Annachiara Picco
Supervisor of Ph.D. student, Institute of Astronomy – KU Leuven
"Binary Evolution in the context of the Einstein Telescope"
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"
2022 - Lecturer of the 6 ECTS MSc obliged course "Stellar Structure and Evolution"
KU Leuven, Belgium
2021 - Lecturer: Gave three lectures on gravitational wave astrophysics in the context of the course "High-Energy Astrophysics"
KU Leuven, Belgium
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
2017 - Lecturer at Workshop: Lecturer for a full day at the "MESA summer school"
University of California Santa Barbara, USA
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
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
2014-present - 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 am one of the main developers, as well as the lead developer of its binary evolution module and one of 4 members of its technical council. I also act as curator of the public repository where results and input files to reproduce published work is posted by users.
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).