Leonardo Ferreira
lferreira@uvic.ca
0000-0002-8919-079X, Astronomer

About

I'm currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at University of Victoria working in Prof. Sara Ellison's group. I'm interested in uncovering how galaxies evolve across cosmic time with a focus on the transformational impact of galaxy mergers. I combine modern big box cosmological simulations and deep learning with data from ground-based telescopes and space telescopes, to forward model the evolution of merging into observations.

Using JWST NIRCam imaging, I showed, together with the EPOCHS group, that the optical morphologies of massive galaxies at z>3 are more regular than what was previously thought. I also made major contributions to the EPOCHS internal JWST reduction pipeline, with the aim to reduce all extragalactic public data using the same standard.

Recently I joined The Ultraviolet Near Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) to identify and chracterize galaxy mergers up to z~0.3 across the northern sky down to exquisite depths, revealing low-surface brightness features otherwise hidden in past sky surveys 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.