Carolina Agurto

Her main research interests are the early stages of protoplanetary disks: from the dusty envelope characterization to how the dust grows through the disk. The gas and dust budget around young protostars plays a fundamental role in the process of planet formation, since these are the ingredients from which the planets are formed. In this context, she has been studying how early in the star and planet formation process the dust grains start to efficiently coagulate and evolve from micron-sized particles to pebbles and planetesimals. For that purpose, Carolina has analyzed interferometric data from SMA, NOEMA, VLA and ALMA. Additionally, she developed SiDE (SimpleDisk-Envelope) a framework that produces synthetic dust maps using the radiative transfer tool RADMC-3D and fit thesynthetic observations to the data-sets using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) fitting routine.