Alvaro Hacar promoted to Associate Professor

Alvaro Hacar promoted to Associate Professor

After a successful evaluation, Alvaro Hacar has been promoted to Associate Professor at the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Vienna.

Hacar has a long-standing history with the Department, as he carried out his first postdoc position in Vienna between 2012 and 2016. He later moved to the Netherlands to continue his research as independent fellow. In 2020 Hacar came back to Vienna with a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant to carry out the project EMERGE (Emergence of high-mass stars in complex fiber systems).

The scope of the EMERGE project is to investigate which physical processes determine the formation of high-mass stars, how they grow to such large masses, and to understand if their formation process is similar to that of lower mass stars. To achieve this, EMERGE will intensely exploit the ALMA public archive to build a homogeneous sample of massive filamentary networks. The observational results will then be tested against simulations by means of a new generation of analysis tools.

Additionally, to research, Hacar has been strongly involved with the Master’s program at the Institute with the role of Master’s coordinator. He brought forward new processes to make the Master’s program more efficient and effective. Since 2022, he is also working as Deputy Coordinator for the COSMOS branch at the VISESS Doctoral School.

With the past evaluation, Hacar is here to stay as Associate Professor. We are looking forward to seeing which new projects and ideas he brings to the Department!