Petri Vaisanen

SALT Astronomer

Petri is originally from Finland. He finished his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 2001, though the work on infrared galaxies and galaxy evolution was mainly done during a 3-year 'pre-doc' period at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the U.S. For his post-doc he dragged his family of six yet again to a new continent, to Santiago, Chile, where he held a European Southern Observatory (ESO) fellowship at VLT/Paranal. Since they all thoroughly enjoyed the Mediterranean climate, a move to Cape Town, SAAO and SALT was a no-brainer in late 2004. Outside work the whole bunch enjoys camping, hiking and running (ok, the last one mostly Petri).

His research interests still lie in galaxy evolution and star formation in galaxies both nearby and far. Recently he has been especially interested in strongly star-forming and interacting galaxies and he continues to use the biggest telescopes, such as SALT, VLT, and Gemini, for his work.