Marcelo Barraza-Alfaro joins NBIA as MSCA Fellow
Marcelo Barraza-Alfaro has been awarded a two-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to work on the project “InnerDisk: Unraveling the turbulent structure of the terrestrial planet-forming region”, to be carried out with Martin Pessah in the Theoretical Astrophysics group at the NBIA.
Marcelo earned his PhD in July 2022 from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, followed by a three-year postdoctoral associate position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Marcelo will join the NBIA as an MSCA postdoctoral fellow in September 2026.
The inner regions of protoplanetary disks are nurseries for the formation of terrestrial planets. However, the connection between the thermo-chemical structure of the inner disk and the composition of forming exoplanets remains poorly understood, particularly how disk turbulence influences this link.
In recent years, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has delivered an unprecedented amount of information about the chemical inventory of the disk's inner regions. However, these observations lack the spatial resolution needed to resolve the disk structure, making modeling critical for interpreting the disk's properties and physical processes.
As an MSCA fellow, Marcelo will develop novel numerical simulations to study the inner protoplanetary disk, aiming to directly connect them with JWST observations. These models will explore the effects of realistic turbulence on both the inner disk structure and its chemical composition. By producing synthetic spectra at mid-infrared wavelengths, the results will be compared with JWST/MIRI spectra, providing new insights into the dynamics of the terrestrial planet-forming region. This work will bridge the gap between theory, numerical methods, and observations, advancing our understanding of the diversity of exoplanets.