Editors of A&A

Thierry Forveille

Thierry Forveille is an astronomer at Observatoire de Grenoble, which is part of the University of Grenoble, in Southeastern France. His primary research interest is to understand how planets form around stars. He studies both the disks in which those planets (will) form, using ALMA and the IRAM telescopes, and the resulting planet populations around mature very low mass stars, using primarily radial velocity monitoring. He is is excited about the many new tools that are becoming available or being built to find and characterize extrasolar planets.

Forveille studied physics at Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris, and did his PhD thesis work at the University of Grenoble, with an interruption while he helped commission the IRAM 30m telescope near Granada, Spain. He became an assistant astronomer at Observatoire de Grenoble immediately after his PhD and has worked there ever since, except for a six years stint at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii. He became an associate editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics in 2006 and has been the editor in chief of the journal since 2012.

Associate Editor-in-Chief

João Alves

João Alves

João Alves is a professor of stellar astrophysics at the University of Vienna, in Austria. His primary research interest is to understand how diffuse interstellar gas clouds form, evolve, and eventually collapse to form stars and planets. He is excited about the exploration of the European Space Agency’s newly released Gaia satellite data, the upcoming European Extremely Large Telescope, and the search for intelligent life in the universe.

Alves studied physics at Universidade de Lisboa, in Portugal, did his PhD thesis work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and moved to Münich, Germany, to become a European Southern Observatory (ESO) fellow. He became an ESO staff member and head of the visiting astronomers section before moving to southern Spain to take the directorship of the German–Spanish Astronomical Center at Calar Alto. In addition to his professorship at University of Vienna, which he has held since 2010, Alves is the vice-dean of the Faculty of Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy. He is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, sits on the ESO Council, and serves as the Astronomy & Astrophysics letters editor in chief.

Associate Letters Editor-in-Chief

Thierry Forveille

David Elbaz

David Elbaz is director of research in the Astrophysics Department of the CEA Saclay. His primary research interest is to understand how galaxies formed their stars, with an emphasis on the hidden side of star-formation due to dust-obscuration, and what caused the rise and fall of star formation in galaxies at cosmic scales. His work on the study of galaxy formation and evolution has been awarded the Chrétien Award from the American Astronomical Society in 2000 and the Jaffé Award from the French Academy of Sciences (Fondation de l'Institut de France) in 2017.

He has been the head of the "Cosmology and Galaxy Evolution" laboratory from 2001 to 2019 and a member of the Astronomy Working Group advising the European Space Agency for the selection of its future satellites from 2015 to 2018. Since 2017, he is the president of the Scientific Council of the National Program on Cosmology and Galaxies for CNRS-INSU, France. He is a member of the SPICA satellite Science Study Team for ESA and co-leads the Science Working Group on Galaxies for the Euclid satellite. He has been the managing editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2018.

Paola Michela Andreani

Paola Michela Andreani is a Full Astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). She currently serves as Programme Scientist for ESO within the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) project.

She has been working at ESO since 2006, initially involved with the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA). She was responsible for establishing and managing user support for European ALMA users at ESO, setting up the system from scratch in collaboration with the European network of institutes participating in ALMA. She has also served as Chair of the ESO-Garching Faculty for four years and Head of the Office for Science at ESO. In this role, she supervised numerous PhD students, oversaw the career development of postdoctoral researchers, managed the ESO library, and promoted scientific activities within the organisation. Previously, she was an Associate Astronomer at INAF in Padova and Trieste (Italy), and before that, an Assistant Professor at the University of Padova. She obtained both her Master’s degree and PhD in Physics from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy.

Her scientific interests span the fields of cosmology and extragalactic astronomy, with a particular focus on observations of the interstellar and circumgalactic medium, active galactic nuclei, and their interactions with host galaxies.

Maria Teresa (Maite) Beltrán

Maria Teresa (Maite) Beltrán is Primo Ricercatore (Level II researcher astronomer IIl) at the INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri in Florence, Italy. Her main research interests focus on various aspects of star formation, particularly high-mass stars and their disks, as well as the role of magnetic field in this process. She is also interested in astrochemistry, with a special interest on prebiotic molecules like glycolaldehyde and ethylene glycol. She carries out her studies mainly at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths with interferometers such as ALMA and single dish such as IRAM 30m.

Maite Beltrán studied physics at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, and completed her PhD thesis work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge (USA), as a Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory predoctoral fellow. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri in Florence, Italy, served as a “Juan de la Cierva” researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, and worked as a “JAE” researcher at CSIC in Barcelona, Spain. She has been member of the Time Allocation Committee of the most important space and ground observatories (including ESO, James Webb, Herschel, and ALMA) and has been referee for grant applications of major international organisms. Since 2024, Maite Beltrán has been co-leader of the ISM and star formation working group of the European ALMA2040 efforts.

Lisa Bugnet

Lisa Bugnet is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Her work focuses on the internal dynamical processes of stars, with particular expertise in asteroseismology and magnetohydrodynamics. She combines theoretical developments, numerical modeling, and observational analyses to investigate the role of magnetic fields in stellar structure and evolution.

Lisa Bugnet studied astrophysics at the Paris Observatory and Earth sciences at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. She completed her PhD in astrophysics at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in 2020. She then joined the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York as a Flatiron Research Fellow. In 2023, she joined ISTA as its first Assistant Professor in Astrophysics, playing a leading role in establishing astrophysics research at the institute. In 2026, she became an Associate Editor at Astronomy & Astrophysics in stellar physics.

José A. Caballero

José A. Caballero is an associate professor at the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid.

He has developed his career in a number of research institutions and universities in the Spanish mainland, the Canary Islands and Germany. Although he started his career studying the Solar System, his current research areas are exoplanets, brown dwarfs, stars of all spectral types and astronomical instrumentation. He played a major role in the design and construction of CARMENES, with which he and his team have discovered dozens of exoplanets in the solar neighbourhood, some of them similar to the Earth.He has been a member of important telescope time allocation committees worldwide (James Webb, Hubble, ESO, Observatorios de Canarias), of relevant panels for the European Research Council, European Space Agency and NASA, and of science/local organisation committees of numerous international meetings and schools.

He is also involved in outreach activities related to music, planetarium movies and science fiction. During his free time, he runs and hikes; he has set himself the goal of beating his personal best of 102 km in less than 17 hours.

Sergio Campana

Sergio Campana is Dirigente di Ricerca (full astronomer) at the INAF - Osservatorio astronomico di Brera, in Merate Italy. His primary research interest is in high-energy astrophysics, working on X-ray binaries, Gamma-ray bursts, tidal disruption events, and magnetars. He worked on source detection algorithms in X-ray images. He is also active in technology. He contributed building the X-ray telescope (XRT) onboard the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (of which he is responsible for the instrument calibrations) and is the Principal Investigator of the Son of X-shooter (SOXS) spectrometer to be installed at the New Technology Telescope (NTT) at ESO-La Silla.

Campana studied physics at the Università di Pavia with a thesis on quantum gravity and did his PhD thesis at the Università di Milano on accretion onto compact objects. After one year of short visits around, he got a first a temporary position and then a permanent position at the Osservatorio astronomico di Brera and has worked there ever since. He is author of more than 400 papers (20 of which on Nature and Science). He became an associate editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics in 2015.

Françoise Combes

Françoise Combes is professor in College de France, on the chair “Galaxies and Cosmology”. She is an astrophysicist at Paris Observatory, and member of the Academy of Sciences. Her main areas of research are the formation and evolution of galaxies, their dynamics and co-evolution with supermassive black holes, the interstellar medium of galaxies and dark matter models. By her computer simulations, she was the first to discover the mechanism to form bulges in spiral galaxies, through vertical bar resonances. She was also a pioneer in molecular absorptions in front of remote quasars, leading to constraints on fundamental constants variation.

Françoise Combes studied physics at Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), in Paris, and became ENS assistant professor in 1975. She was deputy director of the Physics Laboratory in Ecole Normale Supérieure from 1985 to 1989, and became an astronomer in Paris Observatory in 1989. She has received several awards, including the CNRS Silver Medal (2001), the Tycho Brahe Prize from the European Astronomical Society (2009) or the Gothenburg Lise Meitner Prize (2017). She was elected member of the European Academy (2009) and president of the French Astronomical Society (2002-2004). She has been an associate editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2003.

Ignacio Ferreras

Ignacio Ferreras is staff astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, in Tenerife, Spain, and honorary professor at University College London, UK. His research interests mainly focus on galaxy formation and evolution, with emphasis on the analysis of the stellar population content, along with the exploitation of large galaxy surveys using multivariate analysis methods.

Ferreras studied theoretical physics and astrophysics in Spain (Valladolid and Cantabria) and the USA (Cornell), later embarking on several postdoctoral positions at Oxford, ETH-Zurich and UCL, followed by tenured academic positions at King's College London and University College London. After 20 years doing research in the UK, Ferreras moved to sunnier climes, taking up a tenured astronomer position at the IAC. Since 2024 he is Councillor of the European Astronomical Society, and has also served in Commission J1 of the International Astronomical Union (Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies). He has authored over 150 research papers. He also published two textbooks on extragalactic astrophysics and dark matter, that can be freely downloaded from the UCL Press website. He became A&A associate editor in July 2025.

Zhanwen Han

Zhanwen Han is a professor at the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His primary research interests include stellar evolution, binary evolution, binary population synthesis, evolutionary population synthesis (spectral synthesis), the formation of various binary-related objects (e.g. double compact objects, progenitors of type Ia supernovae), binary observations with LAMOST survey.

Marc Huertas-Company

Marc Huertas-Company is an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and associate professor on leave from the Paris Observatory and Paris Cité University. His research is at the intersection of galaxy formation and Artificial Intelligence. He obtained his PhD in 2008 from the Paris Observatory. After a short postdoctoral contract at ESO, he moved back to Paris as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor. Since 2018, he is at the IAC, where he leads the Artificial Intelligence group. He has spent several sabbatical periods in the United States - University of Pennsylvania, Flatiron Institute and University of California Santa Cruz, where he holds an adjunct professor position.

Andreas Koch-Hansen

Andreas Koch-Hansen is an Apl. Professor (extraordinary) at the Center for Astronomy at Heidelberg University. His research interests cover the chemical evolution of star clusters to galaxy evolution and morphology, with a major involvement in large-scale surveys like 4MOST and HERON.

After his studies of physics at Heidelberg University, he obtained his PhD from Basel University on the topic of the Chemodynamical evolution of dwarf galaxies. After various postdoc, fellowship, and lecturer/reader positions throughout the US and the UK, Andreas obtained his permanent position in Heidelberg in 2017. In 2023 he joined A&A as an associate editor in the field of stellar populations.

Rubina Kotak

Rubina Kotak received her Ph.D degree in 2003 from Lund University, Sweden, her thesis title being "Inside Pulsating White Dwarfs: Clues from time-resolved spectroscopy". From 2002 to 2005, she worked at Imperial College London under a fellowship of the Royal Commission of the Exhibition of 1851. From 2005 to 2006, she was an ESO Fellow at Garching. From 2007 to 2017, she was an Associate Professor / Reader at Queen’s Uni. Belfast, UK, after which she started at her current position at the Uni. of Turku, Finland. Her research interests include supernovae, explosive transients, massive stars, nucleosynthesis, and electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational waves.

Emmanuel Lellouch

Emmanuel Lellouch is an astronomer at Observatoire de Paris, France. His primary science interest is to understand the physico-chemical and dynamical processes governing Solar System bodies and extrasolar planets and driving their evolution. His own work includes the study of planetary and satellite atmospheres and of distant small bodies (trans-Neptunian objects, comets). He uses mostly observational approaches, both ground-based and space-borne, with emphasis on sub-mm and infrared spectroscopy. He is also closely following the growing field of characterization studies of extrasolar planets and their atmospheric properties.

Lellouch got his astronomer position after a PhD at Observatoire de Paris and a post-doc at ESTEC. He has since then been working in Paris. He was awarded the Urey Prize of the Planetary Division of the American Astronomical Society in 1995. He became an associate editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics in 2018.

Maria Madjarska

Maria Madjarska is a professor of heliophysics at the Space Research and Technology Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and, as of 2025, holds a temporary position at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. She has been a leader and collaborator in both observational and theoretical studies of the solar atmosphere, focusing on mass and energy transfer processes that contribute to atmospheric heating and solar wind acceleration. She has worked with numerous space missions, beginning with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), and continuing with TRACE, STEREO, IRIS, Hinode, SDO, Solar Orbiter, and Parker Solar Probe, as well as with data from various ground-based observatories. Her main research interests include the heating of magnetically confined plasma (loops) and the atmospheric dynamics associated with the evolution of open and closed magnetic flux.

After completing her PhD in Bulgaria, she held several research positions across Europe and Asia, beginning as a postdoctoral researcher at Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland, UK, in 2000. She is the author or co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including a Living Review in Solar Physics on “Coronal Bright Points”. She is an active conference and seminar speaker and, throughout her career, has been deeply committed to educating, inspiring, mentoring, and supporting younger generations of researchers

David Mouillet

David Mouillet is an astronomer at Grenoble Observatory. His main field of research is exoplanetary systems observed in direct imaging and spectroscopy. The challenge in angular resolution and contrast to observe such systems motivates a strong investment in instrumentation, from upstream R&D exploring new concepts to operational instruments, involving adaptive optics, coronagraphy and/or interferometry.

After a PhD in Grenoble, and some contributions on VLT/NAOS adaptive optics system or VLTI/AMBER 3 beam interferometric combiner, David was the director of 2-m telescope B. Lyot in French Pyrénées (2003-2006). He was then the Project Scientist of VLT/SPHERE high contrast imager (2006-2015) up to on-sky validation. He was chair of INSU-ASHRA, French coordination of high angular resolution instrumentation activties (2015-2020), and member of the NASA/HabEx Science and Technological Definition Team (STDT). He is A&A associate editor since 2019.

Benoît Noyelles

Benoît Noyelles is associate professor at the University of Franche-Comté, in Besançon, France. His primary research interests are the dynamics of comets, and the binary Trans-Neptunian Objects. His scientific evolution started from celestial mechanics and the long-term orbital evolution of the satellites of Jupiter, before moving to their rotation and the geophysical processes affecting it. He also had the opportunity to study the rotation of Mercury, in preparation of the ESA/JAXA mission Bepi-Colombo.

After his PhD at Paris Observatory, he moved to the University of Namur, Belgium, for 12 years, before obtaining his position in Besançon in 2018. He is Secretary of Division A Fundamental Astronomy of the International Astronomical Union, and Associate Editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2019.

Vasiliki Pavlidou

Vasiliki Pavlidou is Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Crete in Greece. Her research inerests include cosmology (focusing on large-scale structures, dark matter, and dark energy); multimessenger high-energy astrophysics (using cosmic rays, gamma rays, neutrinos, and lower-energy photons as probes of sources such as supermassive black holes and their relativistic jets, starforming galaxies, and dark matter condensations); the physics of the interstellar medium (interstellar magnetic fields, turbulence and their interplay, as well as the impact of magnetic fields on our understanding of the ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray sky); astrostatistics; and astronomical polarimetry.

Pavlidou studied Physics at the University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and obtained her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Ilinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US. After a Kavli fellowship at the University of Chicago, a NASA Einstein fellowship which she held at Caltech, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, she joined the faculty of the Physics Department of the University of Crete in 2012. She has been the Management Panel Chair of the RoboPol Collaboration since 2013, and she is a founding member of the PASIPHAE Collaboration. She is Affiliated Faculty at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Foundation of Research and Technology - Hellas. In 2014 she was the recipient of the “L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for women in science” for Greece. She has been Associate Editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2023.

Maurizio Salaris

Maurizio Salaris is Professor of Stellar Astrophysics at the Liverpool John Moores University, in the United Kingdom. His research interests involve theoretical stellar evolution, stellar physics, and the study of stellar populations, both resolved and unresolved.

He studied physics at the university 'La Sapienza' in Rome, Italy, and worked on his thesis at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Frascati, near Rome. He then joined the Teramo Astronomical Observatory (Italy), followed by tenures at the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (Spain), and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (Germany) as a Marie Curie Fellow. He moved to Liverpool as a research fellow in 1998, and became full professor in 2009.

In addition to scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, Salaris has published two textbooks on stellar evolution and stellar populations, plus a chapter in a multiauthor textbook on stellar physics. He is an associate editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2018.

Eva Schinnerer

Eva Schinnerer is a senior staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, where she is leading a research group on Extragalactic Star Formation. She is interested in understanding the physical processes that lead to molecular gas and star formation in galaxies and how these evolve with cosmic time by combining observations across the electro-magnetic spectrum.

After her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, she held a postdoctoral scholarship at the California Institute of Technology working with the Owens Valley Radio Observatory mm-interferometer. Before moving to her current position at MPIA, she was a Jansky fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, USA. She is editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since fall 2023.

Steve Shore

Steve Shore is professor of astrophysics in the physics department of the University of Pisa, a position he has held since 2003. His observational and theoretical research, rooted in spectroscopy and hydrodynamics, includes classical and recurrent novae, stellar winds and jets, accretion processes in close binary systems, evolution of massive stars, stellar dynamo processes, and interstellar turbulence.

Shore has been a scientific editor of A&A since 2003. He was a scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal from 1996-2003.

Shore obtained his MSc in Earth and Space Sciences from SUNY-Stony Brook, his PhD in astronomy from the University of Toronto, did postdoctoral research at Columbia University, and has been faculty at Case Western Reserve University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and, before coming to Europe, a decade as chair in physics at Indiana University South Bend. He has also been an operations astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute and a team member of the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) on HST at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Mario Tafalla

Mario Tafalla is senior astronomer at the Observatorio Astronomico Nacional in Madrid, Spain. He studies the earliest stages of the star-formation process, and uses a variety of radio telescopes, including those of IRAM and ALMA, to investigate the physics and chemistry of the star-forming gas. He has analyzed the properties of the cold and quiescent gas in pre-stellar condensations and the supersonic outflows that are powered by protostars. In recent years, he has been expanding his interests to include larger spatial scales and investigate the structure and fragmentation of molecular clouds.

Tafalla studied physics at the Universidad Autonoma in Madrid and did his PhD in the Astronomy Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He spent several years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics before returning to Spain and joining the Observatorio Astronomico Nacional.

Yannis Zouganelis

Yannis Zouganelis is an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency in Madrid, Spain. Since 2014, he has been serving as the Deputy Project Scientist of the Solar Orbiter mission, a joint ESA-NASA mission that was launched on 10 February 2020 and will provide close-up, high-latitude observations of the Sun. His primary research focuses on the physics of the solar wind, an out-of-equilibrium semi-collisional plasma that remains poorly understood. In particular, understanding its acceleration and heating is a persistent and challenging astrophysical problem.

Zouganelis studied physics at the University of Athens (Greece), did his PhD at the Observatoire de Meudon (France) and was a Marie Curie fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley (USA). From 2008 to 2013 he was an associate professor of Astrophysics at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, before moving to ESA. He is an associate editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2019.