Dr. Vanessa Hill is Directrice de Recherche (Senior Researcher) at CNRS, at the Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Nice, France. She obtained her PhD in 1997 with a PhD dissertation on the "Chemical Evolution of the Magellanic Clouds" ("Evolution Chimique des Nuages de Magellan"). She then carried out a short postdoctoral fellowship in Sao Paulo, Brazil, before moving to an ESO Postdoctoral Fellowship at ESO, Garching, Germany. In 2001 she became permanent staff at the CNRS Observatoire de Paris, GEPI, and moved to Nice in
2008. Between 2012 and 2017, she was deputy director of the Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Nice, France.
Her main research field is Galactic Archaeology, with a focus on: searching for the signatures of the formation and evolution of our Galaxy in the kinematics and chemistry of its stellar constituents; searches for extremely metal poor stars (EMPS) in our Galaxy and its satellites; chemical characterisation of EMPS to probe the nature of First Stars. Dr. Hill is also interested in the study of galaxy evolution on the smallest scale such as those of dwarf galaxies and the Magellanic Clouds, as well as the study of chemical abundances at the surface of stars to constrain stellar nucleosynthesis. During her scientific career she has been author of 191 publications in peer reviewed articles, cited about 15700 times, and presented 19 invited reviews at international conferences.
Dr. Hill is the Lead of the ground-based spectroscopic Gaia follow-up with WEAVE (Science Team Lead for Galactic Archaeology, whose science team involves 140 researchers across the WEAVE participating countries: UK, ES, NL, IT, FR, MX) and co-I of the Large Public Survey Gaia-ESO Survey (300 nights with FLAMES@VLT, 2011-2015), with a builder status acknowledging a major role in the survey building.
Dr. Hill has also had a large involvement in instrumental projects; to mention a few: Tests, integration, and commissioning of the UVES and FLAMES spectrographs at VLT, as well as their science exploitations (incl. coordination of the GIRAFFE GTO); Member of the ESO Extremely Large Telescope Science Working Group; Member of the ESO review panel (PDR) for MOONS at 4MOST; Science Team member of the ELT multi-object spectrograph EVE/OPTIMOS [2008-2010] and MOSAIC [2013—]; Science Team member of the Mona Kea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) project.
