Team SKA
Dr Lourdes Verdes-Montenegro Senior Scientific Researcher, IAA, Spain Dr Lourdes Verdes-Montenegro has been at the forefront of Spain’s involvement in the SKA project for many years, coordinating Spanish participation through the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia (IAA-CSIC) in Granada. A highly regarded researcher on galaxies in extreme environments, Lourdes is also a strong proponent of Open Science and reproducibility as a route to improving access and equality, giving regular talks on the subject at an international level. We spoke to her about all these things, plus what inspired her love of astronomy, the health challenges which affect her everyday life, and how we can all contribute to inclusivity at work. Let’s discuss your early years, Lourdes: where did you grow up, and was science always a part of your life? I was born in Switzerland, my family were immigrants from Spain, and from the age of five I grew up in Madrid. That’s the time I started looking at the
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sky. I went with my family to a friend’s summer house in the countryside and the skies were very dark. My two brothers and I would look at the stars and at how complicated everything was. I wanted to understand what’s up there. I remember we talked about what we would do if an alien ship came down, and I said I would jump in and try to find out everything! Then a cat passed by and gave us a fright, and we were saying “OK that’s just a cat… imagine ET”! That’s a scarier prospect! So when did you realise you wanted to be an astronomer? I was about 11 or 12. I had a little diary where I wrote about things like the 1970s TV show Space: 1999, which I found very exciting, thinking about life on other planets. In my diary I found old newspaper cuttings about
observatories in Spain and things from around that time too. Some years later I understood that physics was a way to follow astronomy, so I studied physics. In that time Isaac Asimov books played a relevant role too. Talk us through your route to the SKA project. Even before I graduated from university, I went to the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) to find out if I could do some work there. I started doing some astronomical work at Sierra Nevada Observatory in Granada, doing photometry of variable stars, and one day in the library I met a new researcher at the institute who was a radio astronomer (José M. Torrelles). I ended up doing my PhD with him, so I entered the radio astronomy world, first studying our galaxy and then other galaxies in my
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