Hi, I am Alena!

I am a member of the ISM and star formation group at the University of Vienna's Department of Astrophysics, and am currently in my fourth, and final, year of my PhD. I started my doctoral studies in 2023 after finishing my bachelor's in Physics and Astronomy, as well as my master's in Astronomy at the University of Vienna. While I am nominally based in Austria, I had the opportunity to spend 9 months at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) headquarters in Garching b. Munich in Germany in 2024 in the course of an ESO studentship.

My thesis project is part of the ERC Advanced Grant ISM-FLOW, awarded to my supervisor and group leader Prof. Joao Alves. My contribution to this project is to establish the star formation history of the nearest, most massive star formation region — the Orion giant molecular cloud complex — and to help understand how this region has contributed to shaping the structure and stellar content of the present-day solar neighborhood. As a secondary objective, I also hold a supporting role in the data preparation and scientific analysis of the results of the VISIONS survey.

My research generally revolves around everything that involves stars that can be described as "clustered" at least in the statistical sense. I am interested in their positions, movements, and ages, all of which help me reconstruct the evolution of larger scale structure. Also, I am slowly branching out into the field of the ISM, to better understand the interactions between the stars and their surrounding environment. Additionally, I enjoy tinkering with interactive visualization ideas for my results.

Outside of my immediate research interests, I am fascinated by astronomical observations and instrumentation. Although my hands-on experience is so far limited to an observing school at La Silla, Chile, in 2025, I immediately fell in love with this side of astronomy.