- Area(s) of Expertise
- Research Area(s)
Social Media
Biography
Noemí Pinilla-Alonso’s research examines how the solar system formed and evolved, including how water ice and organics formed life on Earth. Her work involves determining surface compositions of minor bodies and interpreting them in terms of surface alteration mechanisms and, ultimately, formation conditions. Pinilla-Alonso combines observational techniques with modeling efforts. For the observational effort, she accesses either ground-based observatories (e.g. Gemini, GTC, IRTF) or data from spacecraft (e.g., Deep Impact and GAIA in the near future) or data from space telescopes (e.g. NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, Herschel Space Observatory). To analyze these data, she applies different techniques e.g. modeling of the scattering of light by multi-component surfaces and clustering techniques, to mine large data sets.
Pinilla-Alonso leads DiSCo-TNOs: Discovering the composition of the trans-Neptunian objects, icy embryos for planet formation, a James Webb Space Telescope program that will observe almost 60 trans-Neptunian objects.
Pinilla-Alonso joined UCF in 2015 as an associate scientist in planetary science at the Florida Space Institute. She was also the deputy principal scientist of the Arecibo Observatory since 2017. She received her doctorate in astrophysics and planetary sciences from the Universidad de La Laguna in Spain. Pinilla-Alonso also holds a joint appointment as a professor in UCF’s Department of Physics.
- Languages Spoken
- Spanish
- Department
- Physics
