Dr. Alessandra Marie Carmichael-Martins

Dr. Alessandra Carmichael-Martins, originally from Cádiz, Spain, works at the European Southern Observatory as an Adaptive Optics Physicist for new Instrumentation being developed for the Very Large Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Dr. Carmichael-Martins is a physicist from the University of Sevilla, Spain, and specialized in Optics and Photonics from Imperial College London, UK, with a keen interest in optical systems and optical design. She completed for her PhD in physics at University College Dublin, Ireland in 2019 where she focused on developing novel testing instrumentation for vision science. As a postdoc at Indiana University, USA, she specialized in the design and implementation of adaptive optics imaging systems for the human eye in-vivo, and was awarded two fellowship grants to focus on her own research projects. Dr. Carmichael-Martins continued focusing on the design and development of imaging devices as diagnostic tools for vision science at the University Hospital in Bonn, Germany, before transferring her experience in adaptive optics to the field of astronomy. Parallel to her dedication to research, she was elected a 2022 OPTICA Ambassador and has focused on helping minority groups in STEM, international students and on giving visibility to mental health in academia.