Denis Burgarella

Denis Burgarella (born 8 May 1960 in Marseille, France) is a French astrophysicist at .

Education Denis Burgarella studied in Marseille (Lycée Marcel Pagnol) from 1975 to 1978. From 1978 to 1982, he studied at Université Aix-Marseille II (now Université d'Aix-Marseille). After that, he moved to Nice University where he got a Ph.D. in astrophysics at LAM. From 1987 to 1989, he did a CNES Post-doc there as well. From 1989 to 1992 he did a post-doc in Space Telescope Science Institute.

Career Since 1992 Burgarella has a permanent position as an astronomer in LAM.

He was president of SF2A from 2008 to 2010. He was president of the J1 commission of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) from 2015 to 2018. From 2018 to 2021, he is president of IAU Division J. (Galaxies and Cosmology)

Research His research works are about galaxy at all redshifts (z), in a cosmological context and more specifically on the formation and evolution of galaxies and the detection, identification and study of galaxies in the early universe using a multi-wavelength approach (Spectral Energy Distribution, SED) via observation and modelling. In Burgarella et al. (2020)). Denis Burgarella and his colleagues have identified and characterised (some of) the first dust grains created from stars in the universe at redshifts 5 < z < 10.

To understand these galaxies, they have developed, with Médéric Boquien and a team to seven people, a code that models the emission of galaxies from the X-rays to the sub-mm: CIGALE, Code Investigating GALaxy Emission). CIGALE is parallelised in Python 3 and is designed to fit large samples of several ten of thousands observed SEDs by comparing the observed data to several 100 million models.