Vasileios Kalaitzidis

I am a PhD candidate at Leiden Observatory, within the Faculty of Science at Leiden University. My research focuses on salts in diverse protostellar environments, using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to trace their evolution from molecular clouds to protoplanetary disks.

 

My PhD is supervised by Dr. Ewine van Dishoeck and Dr. Melissa McClure, who serve as principal and co-principal investigators on numerous JWST programmes. These programmes provide access to an extensive sample of high-resolution spectra, offering new opportunities to investigate the formation, composition, and evolution of ionic species. I aim to combine new laboratory measurements of semi-refractory salts with empirical spectral analysis to understand how their absorption profiles vary between sources and what these variations reveal about the underlying physical and chemical conditions.

 

My previous research spans gravitational lensing and cosmology at the University of St Andrews, UK, and ultra-high-energy gamma-ray astrophysics in Paris, France, and Shanghai, China. I discovered my passion for astrochemistry during a summer research project at ESO in Garching, Germany, supervised by Dr. Pooneh Nazari. There, I used radiative transfer modelling to test whether variations in physical structure could explain observed differences in the column densities of simple chemical species.