My main research interest is understanding the role of cold gas in galaxies and its connection with their properties and environment. I used the largest radio telescopes in the world to investigate how cold gas, which is ­ the raw fuel for star formation, ­ cycles in and out of galaxies.
My main contributions include leadership of the GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey (GASS) and its extension (xGASS), which measured the atomic hydrogen properties of 1200 galaxies. Together with their molecular gas follow-up (xCOLD GASS), these surveys delivered the deepest observations of cold gas in the local Universe, uniquely probing the vastly unexplored gas-poor regime and yielding strong constraints to theoretical models and simulations of galaxy evolution. I also pioneered the application of spectral stacking to the study of gas scaling relations.
My current research focuses on the synergy between radio and optical integral-field spectroscopy observations, taking advantage of data from state-of-the-art surveys such as WALLABY on the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), the SAMI Galaxy Survey on the Anglo-Australian Telescope and MAUVE on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) 8-meter VLT telescope.