Professor Barbara Catinella

My main research interest is understanding the role of gas in galaxies and its connection with their properties and environment. I carried out state-of-the-art, legacy surveys using the largest radio telescopes in the world to investigate how cold gas – the raw fuel for star formation – cycles in and out of galaxies. I led the GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey (GASS) and its low-mass extension, xGASS (http://xgass.icrar.org), which measured the atomic hydrogen properties of 1200 galaxies, and played a key role in xCOLD GASS, the molecular gas follow-up survey with the IRAM 30m telescope in Spain. These surveys (~2300 hr of telescope time in total) delivered the deepest observations of cold gas in the local Universe, uniquely probing the vastly unexplored gas-poor regime and yielding strong constraints to theoretical models and simulations of galaxy evolution. I also led the HIGHz survey, currently the largest sample of galaxies at redshift z>0.2 with measured atomic and molecular hydrogen masses, and pioneered the application of spectral stacking to the study of gas scaling relations.

I currently co-lead WALLABY (https://wallaby-survey.org), a transformational survey on the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) that will provide the largest census of atomic hydrogen in the local Universe ever done, and MAUVE (https://mauve.icrar.org), a large program on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope designed to track the influence of the environment on the gas-star formation cycle of cluster galaxies during their infall.

Prior to joining ICRAR/UWA in September 2015, I held postdoctoral positions at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (USA) and Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching (Germany), and took up a prestigious Future Fellowship at Swinburne University in Melbourne. I obtained my PhD in Astronomy in 2005 from Cornell University.