Francesco D'Eugenio

Welcome to my homepage! I am a postdoc working in the Extragalactic Research Group at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge

I study the evolution of galaxies, focussing on the complex interplay between galaxy dynamics and stellar population properties.

My Research

Below you can find a selection of my current research projects.

Supermassive black-hole quenching

The GA-NIFS Survey provides spatially resolved spectroscopy with unprecedented spatial resolution and quality for redshift z=3, when the Universe was only 2 billion years old. I use this information to study the physical properties of the gas and of the stars in a massive, recently quenched galaxy, finding unequivocable evidence for ongoing feedback from its central supermassive black hole.

Resolved stellar populations 7 Gyr ago

The LEGA-C Survey provides extraordinary quality spectroscopy of galaxies at redshift z=1. I use the chemical and age information encoded in stellar absorption spectra to show that chemical enrichment is regulated by the depth of a galaxy potential well.

The interplay between stellar populations and dynamics with integral field spectroscopy

The Fundamental Plane is a tight relation between the dynamical and stellar population observables of early-type galaxies. This relation can be used as a cosmological probe, but its measurements are limited by the intrinsic scatter. Using the resolved spectral information from the SAMI Galaxy Survey, I investigate what are the sources of this scatter, and how to reduce it.

Resolved Hα dynamics of low-mass galaxies

Low-mass galaxies are of paramount importance to understanding galaxy evolution, as they are the building blocks of larger galaxies. However a number of observational challenges makes it difficult to study the dynamics of large samples. The SHADE Survey is the largest integral field spectroscopy survey dedicated to dwarf galaxies. The first paper, discussing the link between stellar mass and kinematics is Barat et al. (2020)