Alex de Koter is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and Professor at KU Leuven. After concluding his PhD research at Utrecht University in 1993, he worked for four years at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (USA) and was one of the first astronomers to use Hubble Space Telescope after the first servicing mission. He joined the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy in 1997. In 2016, de Koter received an NWO-TOP1 grant to study the most massive stars in dwarf galaxies in the Local Group. In addition to his scientific work, de Koter is actively engaged in the popularization of science.
His research focusses on the formation and evolution of massive stars, and the impact of their intense radiation fields and outflows on the interstellar medium of their host galaxies. Through both observational and theoretical studies, using the largest observing facilities on Earth and in space, his long-term goal is to understand the First Stars and their role in galaxy formation and the re-ionization of the universe. He is involved in the development of the multi-object spectrograph MOSAIC, a first-generation instrument for the European Extremely Large Telescope.
Massive stars, First Stars, stellar evolution, mass loss, ionizing radiation