Curriculum Vitae

CV Summary

Professional & Academic Trajectory: I started my professional career as a Mechanical Engineer (10/2002, University of Cagliari). I was funded by the European Commission (EC) for different projects and I exploited my leadership skills by putting together my own project via the EC Future Capital Program (10/2005 – 06/2006). I covered different (leadership-role) positions as a teacher and engineer. My scientific path started with a BSc in Physics at the UB (06/2014), where I was awarded two one-year collaboration grants. I was selected to spend my last year at the ULL, and for an external stage at the IAC. I was awarded a Summer Grant at the IAC in 2014 and worked as a telescope operator at Teide Observatory in 2015. I obtained my MSc degree in Astrophysics at the ULL (06/2016) and, before that, I obtained the prestigious “La Caixa-Severo Ochoa” grant to start my PhD at the IAC (10/2015). My PhD thesis was defended after three years, achieving the highest honors (“Sobresaliente cum laude”), and granting me a Postdoctoral Orientation Period (POP) contract. Then, I moved to MPIA (10/2019) for almost four years until I moved back to the IAC (08/2023) and started my MSCA Fellowship (09/2024).

Publications (as of 01/2026, ADS – see my library: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/public-libraries/a5lxVY5TRGulg7kGeCKPfQ): I have published 80 scientific papers, 20 as first or second author. Of those, 65 are refereed papers in high-impact (Q1) journals (14 as first or second author). My refereed papers have 1909 citations, with only 256 self citations. My first author papers have 203 citations, with a h-index of 26. See more details in the Publication page (link below).

Conferences and seminars: I have given a total of 37 talks (~7.5/year after COVID-19), 18 at conferences and 19 seminars or colloquia (6 invited). I organized 5 conferences, 2 as Scientific Organizing Committee (SOC) chair: 1) the Special Session SS28 at the EAS meeting in 2023: «Understanding the connection between nuclear star clusters, black holes and galaxy evolution»; 2) the workshop «Galactic Centers as tracers of Galaxy Evolution» at the Lorentz Center, October 2025.

Contribution to society: Before academia, I led EU-funded public-oriented initiatives, including my “Renewable-energy workshops for adults and children” (2005 – 2006, 5000€). I held leadership-role positions as an engineer in private companies.

As a Summer Student, I developed an EMCCD camera simulator widely applicable beyond astronomy, with the project: «“Modeling and characterization of EMCCD cameras used in adaptive optics, from a known stochastic model. Validation with real images.” (2014, IAC, Technology Division). I delivered a simulator of EMCCD cameras, typically used in adaptive optics, coupled to Shack-Hartmann sensors. The simulator allows for performance assessment of these cameras, which have broad applications beyond astronomy.

I worked as a telescope operator and carried out dissemination activities at Teide Observatory (2015).

I organized the public-engagement program (Barcelona City Hall cultural center Casa Golferichs, 2023). An outreach program aimed at bridging astronomy with other science and humanities disciplines. It featured three conferences at the (with a gender-balanced lineup of six speakers) plus one public astronomical observation activity. I coordinated a team of organizers from the UB and WiA (Women in Aerospace Europe), in collaboration with Agrupación Astronómica de Sabadell and Àster Agrupació Astronòmica de Barcelona.

I participated in numerous outreach events, and gave ∼20 talks for the general public (most notable: Agrupación Astronómica de Sabadell, 2021, invited, and Pint of Science 2019).

Training of early career researchers: I have supervised (as main advisor) six BSc theses (three ongoing), four MSc theses (two ongoing), two summer fellowships and one internship (“Prácticas Externas”, ongoing). I have actively contributed to the supervision of three PhD students, as reflected by second-author publications (Walo-Martín, Pinna et al. 2022; Hoyer, Pinna et al., 2023). I have been mentoring students in two international mentoring programs, in the SEA Gender Mentoring Program and within the GECKOS collaboration. One of my students secured internship funding during her BSc/MSc work with me, published two papers (Sattler, Pinna et al. 2023, 2025) and gave her first talk at a conference in Australia, granting her a competitive PhD position. I prioritize ECRs for invited talks and leadership roles in conferences.

Collaboration with universities and teaching: I formally collaborate with the private university UNIR, supervising MSc theses and tutoring students; I gave two lectures about my research for the subject Extragalactic Astronomy of the MSc in Astrophysics at the ULL.

Institutional responsibilities: I currently sit on the ULL Astronomy Department Council and the IAC Research Coordination Board, contributing to research strategy and grant-evaluation decisions.

I have served as an ESO OPC panelist, and on six PhD/MSc/BSc theses and two postdoc-hiring committees. I referee for Q1 journals (MNRAS, A&A, ApJ).

I am committed to equality matters (see specific actions in my page on Equal Opportunities). I took the role of Equal Opportunity Officer at MPIA for two years. This commitment, including many responsibilities (e.g., I co-developed the 2022–2024 Gender Equality Plan, 2021–22), was recognized with two MPIA performance bonuses. I am a member of the Women and Astronomy Commission (Comisión Mujeres y Astronomía, CMyA) of the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA). I am currently deeply involved in equal opportunity matters at the IAC.

Funding and internationalization: I secured 181k€ for my MSCA European Fellowship, and ∼130k€ of funding in other grants and visiting programs (plus my salary and internal funding). I have led as PI and joined as Co-I on numerous observing proposals for the most competitive instruments. I was awarded 582 h of competitive telescope time (worth >3.3M€), including as PI 9 hours of VLT/MUSE and 15 hours of WHT/WEAVE.

I have been an active member of seven international collaborations (five are ongoing), in which I have been leading my own research and actively participating in scientific and organizational discussions and co-authoring. The most relevant here:

• 2023 to now: BEARD (international collaboration, >30 members, PIs: J. Méndez-Abreu, A. de Lorenzo, ULL). Leading the science focusing on NSCs in massive spirals and the point-spread-function (PSF) measurements in GTC/MEGARA data.
• 2022 to now: GECKOS (international collaboration, >80 members, PI J. van de Sande, UNSW). Coordinator of two (data and science) working groups: Stellar Populations and Stellar Disks. Leading two science projects. One is a MSc thesis under my supervision (see Research on Stellar Disks). Significant contribution to the observing proposal and to the nGIST data analysis pipeline. Mentor for the early-career researchers in the team.
• 2021 to now: PHANGS (international collaboration, over 100 members, PI: E. Schinnerer, MPIA). Leading the research line on NSCs (Pinna et al. 2026).
• 2018 – 2023: Fornax 3D Survey (international collaboration, 21 members, PI: M. Sarzi, AOP). Core member. I was the first early-career scientist to achieve core-member status (Sep 2018). This role involved me in decision-making, and proposed and coordinated new projects. I led the study of thick disks in this collaboration, with two refereed publications (Pinna et al. 2019a, b) that have an average of 66 citations/paper, a factor 1.6 above the rest of Fornax 3D papers published the same year (on average 38 citations/paper).

Summary of my scientific contributions: Through “TraNSLate: Tracing galaxy evolution with Nuclear Structures in Late-type galaxies”, I am bridging high-resolution cosmological simulations with state-of-the-art IFS observations. I presented a novel method (using the existing code C2D, Méndez Abreu et al. 2019) to decompose nuclear star clusters (NSCs) from IFS data cubes (Pinna et al. 2026). This allows the accurate extraction of NSC properties. I lead NSC studies within PHANGS and BEARD, where my method reveals that spiral galaxies – so far uncharted waters due to observational challenges – may depart from traditionally proposed NSC formation channels. My prior postdoc at MPIA laid the basis for this work: I led an IFS kinematic survey of NSCs, uncovering galaxy morphology-dependent trends (Pinna et al. 2021), and co-supervised the first JWST analysis of an NSC (part of N. Hoyer’s PhD thesis). I am the lead of one of the white papers as part of the Spanish community effort to state the importance of a 30-m northern-hemisphere telescope, focusing on NSCs (Pinna et al. 2025b, subm. Dec 15, 2025).

As a postdoc in the Galactic Nuclei group of MPIA, I complemented my knowledge of galaxy evolution with the study of the centers of galaxies. My unique adaptive-optics assisted integral-field spectroscopy (IFS) survey of the nuclei of eleven galaxies, at parsec-scale resolution, uncovered a trend of NSC kinematic properties with galaxy morphology (Pinna et al., 2021). I later supervised the first JWST photometric analysis of an NSC (Hoyer, Pinna et al., 2022). My studies on galactic centers are followed up by the spectrophotometric decomposition and stellar-population analysis of NSCs in spiral galaxies, using IFS observations as part of the BEARD and PHANGS surveys, and of my Marie Curie Fellowship project TraNSLate. This includes also the analysis of stellar-population trends in the center of galaxies in NIHAO simulations, offering a theoretical counterpart to my observations.

At MPIA, I introduced a new independent research line on galactic disks, both taking advantage of my previous observational skills (Martig, Pinna et al., 2021; with BSc and MSc these later leading to Sattler, Pinna et al., 2023; Sattler, Pinna et al., 2024) but also expanding my expertise to cosmological simulations with an independent new project on thick disks in the AURIGA project (later leading to Pinna et al. 2024a; Pinna et al. 2024b).

See more details in my Research page.

My postdoc phase allowed me to acquire my research independence and establish a complementary bridge between observations and theory. This allows me to answer some puzzling questions regarding galaxy evolution and prepared me to lead my current MSCA project TraNSLate.