Overview
Hello, my name is Rodrigo and I help design and build state-of-the-art instruments to study the early universe and its evolution.
I joined Cornell in Fall 2021 as a PhD student. Since then, I've been working with Prof. Gordon Stacey and Prof. Michael Niemack on multiple aspects of Prime-cam, a cryogenic modular receiver for the CCAT/FYST telescope. In particular, I've been focused on the development of the Epoch of Reionization Spectrometer (EoR-Spec), one of Prime-cam's instrument modules. EoR-Spec is a carefully designed experiment intended to obtain tomographic maps of the early universe (z ∼ 3.5−8.0) through Line Intensity Mapping (LIM) of fluctuations in the aggregate clustering signal encoded in the 158 μm fine-structure line emission from ionized carbon [C II].
I got my undergraduate degree in electronics engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where my research focused on radio astronomy instrumentation. Before joining Cornell, I worked for two years as site engineer at the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), a cosmology experiment located in northern Chile.
Beyond work pursuits, I love running, hiking, camping, and anything that will get me outside and into nature.