Dr. María Concepción Cárdenas Vázquez

Dr M. Concepción Cárdenas current position as a Senior optical engineer at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, where she is Optical lead of the IMAGER and SCAO subsystems of METIS instrument (Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph for the Extremely Large Telescope).

She is specialized in the VIS and IR optics, from the design to the integration, alignment and verification.
In her previous work she has been the optical lead of the wide-field infrared camera PANIC and of the infrared channel of the spectrograph CARMENES (both instruments belong to the Calar Alto Observatory, Almería, Spain).
She conducted her PhD, “PANIC, una cámara infrarroja de gran campo para el Observatorio de Calar Alto”, at the IAA-CSIC, for which she was awarded two prizes: in June 2019, the prize for the best Spanish PhD in Instrumentation, Computing and Technological Development in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2017-2018, by the Spanish Astronomical Society; and in March, 2020, the MERAC Prize 2020 Best Doctoral Thesis Prize in New Technology (Instrumental) by the European Astronomical Society.