About

About me:

I’m Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, an ESO Fellow (Garching).
Before that, I was postdoctoral research associate at the University of Western Australia/ International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, and the University of Nottingham . I did my PhD at Monash University and the University of Hull .

I’m passionate about understanding galaxy morphology and its relation to a galaxy’s assembly history. In particular, I am keen to understand the role of stellar bars in driving galaxy evolution.

I am the deputy lead of the GECKOS survey (Generalising Edge-on galaxies and their Chemical bimodalities, Kinematics, and Outflows out to Solar environments, PI: van de Sande), an ESO large program on VLT/MUSE that is currently observing 35 edge-on disc galaxies of Milky Way mass to determine the importance of internal and external processes in shaping the evolution of disc galaxies.

I am also heavily involved in the MAUVE (MUSE and ALMA Unveiling the Virgo Environment) ESO VLT/MUSE large program (PIs: Cortese & Catinella). MAUVE will observe 40 galaxies at various stages of infall into the Virgo cluster to determine the role of environment on stellar and ISM within galaxies.

Work

At ICRAR/UWA, I worked with A/Prof Luca Cortese, along with the rest of the SAMI/Hector team on the role of stellar and gas kinematics in shaping the galaxies we see today.

During my time at Nottingham, I worked with Prof Alfonso Aragón-Salamanca & Prof Mike Merrifield, along with the rest of the MaNGA team, investigating the formation and evolution of various galaxy structures. In particular, I investigated what the stellar populations of bulges, disks, and bars in galaxies can tell us about their formation history and mechanisms driving their evolution.

At Monash and Hull I worked with Dr. Kevin Pimbblet and A/Prof Michael Brown on populations of galaxies that lie outside of our expected correlations between observable properties. I studied local brightest cluster galaxies, massive isolated void galaxies, and passive spiral galaxies using both precision photometry and integral field spectroscopy.