M. Garcia carried out her thesis research as an international graduate student at The Johns Hopkins University (USA) and obtained her PhD-degree from the University of La Laguna (ULL, 2005). After several early-career appointments at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, she is now a postdoctoral researcher at CAB.

M. Garcia works on massive stars with focus on the OB types and their stellar winds. She is leading an observational effort to unveil and characterize hot massive stars in metal poor galaxies that will improve significantly our knowledge of the first metal-free stars of the Universe. These works are opening the way in the field, and have inspired world-wide observational efforts such as the low-Z working package of the ULLYSES spectroscopic legacy project. Her research has required extensive use of the space observatories FUSE, IUE and HST and of the largest ground-based telescopes in the world: GTC and the VLT. She led the first HST proposals to study the most metal-poor massive stars of the Local Group in the ultraviolet range.

Because her research is meeting the limits of current observing facilities, M. Garcia is involved in the definition of future instrumentation such as the World Space Observatory-UV, ELT-HARMONI and ELT-MOSAIC. She has contributed the massive star science case for two candidates to NASA’s next flagship mission: HabEX and LUVOIR. She conveyed the relevance of metal-poor massive stars along the history of the Universe, and the technological needs of this field of research, in two white papers submitted to the Astro2020 and Voyage2050 surveys.

He currently holds a post as a senior scientist.

WoS Researcher ID: H-5314-2015

Author ID: 55464708400

ORCID: 0000-0003-0316-1208