Jesse van de Sande

Jesse (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in Astrophysics at the School of Physics, and also serves as Culture Director for the School. He is the Principal Investigator and Lead of GECKOS, a VLT/MUSE large program surveying 36 edge-on galaxies with masses similar to the Milky Way. He is passionate about sharing knowledge, mentoring students and early career researchers, and enjoys lecturing and public speaking. His research focuses on understanding how the Milky Way and more massive galaxies form, evolve, and cease forming stars. He has expertise in utilising integral field and near-infrared spectroscopic data to determine the stellar kinematic properties of galaxies. He is currently involved in several major galaxy surveys. Within the SAMI and Hector Galaxy Survey teams, he leads the stellar kinematics working groups. He also works on intermediate and high-redshift galaxies at z = 1–2 using MUSE, X-Shooter, and VIMOS on the VLT, and is a member of the MAGPI and LEGA-C surveys. Recently, he has been studying the dynamics and stellar populations of Milky Way analogues with VLT/MUSE and organised the conference Linking the Galactic and Extragalactic. Jesse obtained his PhD in 2014 from Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, with a thesis titled Dawn of the Red and Dead: Stellar Kinematics of Massive Quiescent Galaxies out to z = 2. From 2015 to 2020 he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher with Joss Bland-Hawthorn at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. In 2020 he was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellowship. In 2024 he joined the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales as a Lecturer in Astrophysics. More information about his research and interests is available on his website. astronomy, astronomy & astrophysics, hyperspectral data, hyperspectral image, galaxies: evolution, galaxy: disc, galaxy: kinematics and dynamics, Cosmology and extragalactic astronomy, Galactic astronomy