Dr. Ignacio Ferreras is a Research Scientist at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and Honorary Professor at University College London (UCL). After a 20-year academic career in the UK at several universities (Oxford, King's College and UCL), Dr. Ferreras joined the IAC in 2018.

His research focuses on the mechanisms controlling galaxy evolution, with an emphasis on the physical processes associated with star formation and chemical enrichment. He is the author of more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals, as well as a textbook on galaxy dynamics, formation and evolution, published by UCL Press in Open Access format, with more than 25.000 downloads from 125 countries. Recently, he has opened a new line of work focused on a theoretical study of the information contained in galaxy spectra, with the aim of optimising the comparison of observations with cosmological models of galaxy formation, as well as with models of stellar population synthesis.

The visit to the Flatiron Institute in New York is part of this new line of work, collaborating with experts in the numerical modelling of galaxy formation processes, using methods based on multivariate analysis and machine learning, and also includes researchers from UCL. One of the recent publications regarding this work programme is "The entropy of galaxy spectra: How much information is encoded?", Ferreras, Lahav, Somerville & Silk, published in RAS Techniques and Instruments, Volume 2, Issue 1 (January 2023).