Francisco M. Montenegro Montes (He/him)

My name is Francisco Miguel Montenegro Montes. I started my studies in Physics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) that I continued at the University of La Laguna (ULL) in the Canary Islands, where I got my degree. In 2005, I was awarded the International Resident fellowship by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) to conduct my Ph.D. studies jointly with the Istituto di Radioastronomia (IRA) in Bologna, Italy.

Later in 2008 I joined the European Southern Observatory (ESO) to serve as operations astronomer for the sub-mm Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in the northern Chilean Andes. In 2015 I became the Head of the APEX Science Operations team, becoming responsible for the performance of the scientific observations and leading the activities of the Sciops team. At this time I got involved in the design studies of the future AtLAST sub-mm observatory, a project led by the Theoretical Physics department at the University of Oslo.

In 2022 I returned to Spain, joining back the Faculty of Physics at the UCM, through the María Zambrano talent attraction program awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities. I am now member of the GUAIX group and the IPARCOS institute, contributing both to research activities and teaching within the Astrophysics Master’s program at UCM. I am involved in the efforts to design and build the TARSIS instrument and the planning of the CATARSIS survey, its primary scientific goal. I also participate in the scientific preparation of the projects to carry out with the MOSAIC instrument, to be installed at ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope.

During my career I have combined my professional activities serving the astronomical community with conducting original research in Astrophysics. As a result I have authored and co-authored over 30 publications in refereed journals, as well as a similar number of contributions to national and international workshops and conferences. To view a list of the publications, please see my ORCID profile.

As predoctoral student at the ULL/IAC I contributed to the preparation of the infrared extragalactic surveys with Spitzer and Herschel. Later during my Ph.D. thesis I studied the population of radio quasars with broad absorption lines (BAL QSOs), addressing the question of their origin. I studied the radio morphology and the shape of the synchrotron spectra in a pilot sample of BAL QSOs looking for indicators related to their age and/or spatial orientation. This was a novel research line by that time and the systematic methodology that I established was later adopted in subsequent studies focusing on larger samples. The Ph.D. thesis is available in Zenodo.

During my years at APEX I participated in the installation, commissioning and performance monitoring of several instruments as well as in the assessment of the APEX science data quality and the optimization of the transfer procedures to the ESO archive. In these years our team contributed to the scientific success of various large surveys conducted with APEX, like ATLASGAL or SEDIGISM. I was particularly involved in the preparation and execution of this last survey. We also contributed to acquiring the first images obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope of both supermassive  black holes at the centers of M87 and our Milky Way.

Since 2021, I have been contributing to the EU-funded studies to design the future 50-m sub-mm telescope, AtLAST, focusing on the development of the science operations plan and contributing to define its scientific goals. This is still work in progress and now the UCM node has become full member of the collaboration.

As Head of the APEX Science Operations I was responsible for the performance of the observatory and for leading the activities of the Sciops team. In 2017 we transitioned into a 24-h remote operations scheme, and I played a key role in its design and implementation. I also served as a panel member for the APEX Time Allocation Committee for the Chilean queue and was an invited expert reviewer for the National Science Foundation.

Within the AtLAST design studies I was co-leading the development of the Operations Plan (Work Package 4). I am currently scientific coordinator of the AtLAST UCM node contributing to the new Horizon Europe project “Consolidating plans for the Atacama Large Aperture Millimeter Telescope” (6.2 M€, with 187.5 k€ granted to UCM).

I currently serve as member of the Scientific Strategy Committee at the IPARCOS institute.

At UCM, I have been lecturer in the Astrophysics Master’s Degree program and supervised students in their master’s theses. I have also participated as lecturer in the “2nd Workshop on Machine Learning and Applications to Physics” organized by IPARCOS. I have been invited to present in the seminar series of the Master in Artificial Vision at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

I am volunteer mentor of high school students as part of the mentorship program launched by the Faculty of Physics with the goal of engaging more girls into STEM university studies.

During my career I have participated in numerous activities related to outreach in astronomy. These include public observations organized by the Agrupación Astronómica de Madrid, or “open day” events bringing astrophysics closer to the general public both at the different astronomical observatories or at the University.

I am also author of written contributions oriented to the general public, like the essay Y eso, ¿cómo se mide?, or the article about “Los secretos de la Vía Láctea” published in the Spanish popular science magazine “Muy Interesante”. l was coordinating the section “Meeting the APEX community” in the APEX web site with interviews to APEX scientists.