My name is Alvaro Menduina-Fernandez and I'm an Astrophysics DPhil student at the University of Oxford. I'm working on the HARMONI instrument, the Integral Field Spectrograph for the European Extremely Large Telescope E-ELT.

I'm from Madrid, Spain and I'm interested in all things Space. After completing my BSc in Aerospace Engineering, I moved to the Netherlands for my MSc in Aerospace Engineering (Space Flight track) at TU Delft. I did an internship and my MSc Thesis at OHB Munich, developing software for the design of space optical instruments with freeform optics.

In 2017, I moved from satellites in Space looking down on Earth, to telescopes on Earth looking into Space when I began my DPhil in Astrophysics at Oxford 🇬🇧. Now on my final year, I've spent the last 3+ years researching how to calibrate Non-Common Path Aberrations (NCPA) for instruments like HARMONI.

There are many aspects of my DPhil Thesis that involve coding, so I spend most of my times pushing commits to GitHub. What keeps me busy?

• Machine Learning: a big part of my research focuses on developing Machine Learning techniques for the calibration of NCPA. Find more about it in my Repo.
• End-to-End Model Simulations: Within the HARMONI project, I'm in charge of developing a Python package to analyse the performance of End-to-End Models of the HARMONI instrument. These are optical models of the complete instrument, which I use to evaluate the performance and prove that HARMONI will work. You can find more about this in my Repo.
• Data Reduction: I'm currently running an experiment with an optical bench that generates lots of exciting data. [COMING SOON]

If you want to know more about me and my research:

• Have a look at my CV 📄
• Feel free to contact me by Email at: [email protected]
• Check out my LinkedIn profile
• My PhD project and research: [COMING SOON]