lferreira@uvic.ca
0000-0002-8919-079X, Astronomer
Leonardo Ferreira
lferreira@uvic.ca
0000-0002-8919-079X, Astronomer
I am a Visiting Professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande (FURG) and Head Scientist at StarFruit. I am leading the creation of the Artificial Intelligence and Astrophysics (AIA) lab, an initiative funded by the Conhecimento Brasil grant and associated with FURG's Institute of Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics (IMEF).
My research seeks to uncover how galaxies evolve across cosmic time, with a focus on the transformational impact of galaxy mergers. I combine large-scale cosmological simulations and deep learning with data from both ground and space-based telescopes to model the observational signatures of these mergers.
Using JWST NIRCam imaging with the EPOCHS group, I demonstrated that massive galaxies at z>3 have more regular optical morphologies than previously thought. I also made key contributions to the EPOCHS internal JWST data reduction pipeline, which aims to standardize the processing of all public extragalactic data.
More recently, during my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria, I joined the Ultraviolet Near Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) collaboration. In this role, I created MUMMI, a ensemble of vision models tailored to identify and characterize galaxy mergers up to z~0.3, leveraging the survey's exquisite depth to reveal low-surface brightness features hidden in previous imaging.
I was awarded a PhD degree from University of Nottingham Thesis: The Cosmic Evolution of Galaxy Structure and Morphology from z=0.5 to 8. (link), where I worked under supervision of Prof. Chris Conselice and Dr. Ulrike Kushner on the evolution of galaxy mergers at high redshift with HST and JWST. I'm also part of PEALRS and UVCANDELS.