Alejandra Muñoz Arancibia

As a kid in Chile, Alejandra once drew a picture of herself working at a computer, well before she knew what a “data scientist” was. Now she laughs at how accurate that turned out to be. Today, she’s an astronomer helping to build ALeRCE, which is one of several software systems designed to process and classify Rubin’s millions of nightly alerts of changes it detects across the night sky.

As the only full-time astronomer on the ALeRCE development team, Alejandra acts as a bridge between scientists and software engineers. She works with experts in machine learning, software, statistics, and astronomy to turn Rubin’s flood of nightly alerts into something scientists can use. On any given day, she might check that the data are consistent and error-free, help train classification algorithms to recognize different kinds of cosmic events, dig into new datasets that might help reveal something new, or flag anything especially interesting that turns up. In other words, if something exciting pops out of ALeRCE’s classifications, Alejandra probably had a role in helping the system recognize it!

Born in Antofagasta in northern Chile, Alejandra went on to study astronomy at Universidad Católica in Santiago. Across both her undergraduate and PhD work there, she studied how galaxies form and evolve using computer simulations. Her first postdoctoral position at Universidad de Valparaíso gave her the chance to work with observational data from ALMA Observatory, studying distant, dusty galaxies that are made visible by gravitational lensing — where massive galaxy clusters in the foreground bend and magnify light like a cosmic zoom lens.

She then joined ALeRCE as a postdoc, drawn by the chance to stay in Chile and the opportunity to build a tool that researchers around the world will use. With that, she was exposed to a whole different area of astrophysics — specifically, objects that change noticeably on human timescales. “Before, I worked in time evolution that lasted millions or hundreds of millions of years, and now I'm moving to things that change in a day or in a year,” she noted. Over time she became increasingly interested in helping to design the systems that will process Rubin’s alert stream in real time, and now she’s a full-time data scientist with ALeRCE.

Outside of work, Alejandra’s favorite hobby is incredibly relatable: “resting in bed and looking at memes.” She also loves dancing (especially Chilean cumbia with her cousins!), and she frequently travels north to spend time with family.

If she could give advice to her younger self, Alejandra would keep it simple by saying, “It was worth keeping going. Stay curious. Stay learning. Stay enjoying everything that can be enjoyed.” For someone guided by curiosity and an interest in the unexpected, it’s no shock that she’s ended up in a field where discovery often begins with surprises!

Lightning round Q&A: Get to know Alejandra better!

If you could trade places with any animal, which would you choose?
A spoiled cat!

If you could go back to any time period in the Universe’s history, which would you choose?
Northern Chile 1000-2000 years ago, to see how my Indigenous ancestors lived. I wonder what we have in common. Maybe they had memes!

If you could go to any fictional universe, where would you go?
The Futurama universe

What’s your most used emoji?
😺 in personal chats, 😁for work