I was born in Buenos Aires, where I studied up to obtaining my doctoral degree in physics from the National University at La Plata, working on cosmology and astrophysics of extended gravitational theories. After several years in fellowships around the world, I moved to the Institute of Space Sciences to start a research group on high-energy astrophysics. My research focuses on compact objects and cosmic rays. I have received several scientific awards including the Tsung-Dao Lee Visiting Professorship, Chinese Academy Presidential Fellowship, its Science Senior Visiting Professorship, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award of the Humboldt Foundation of Germany, the Shakti Duggal Award on Cosmic Ray Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and several others. I was Director of the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) for 8 years 2016-2023, among other posts of responsibility.
Research interests
The familiar sights of peacefully shining stars would be replaced by something extreme and variable should you look with gamma-ray eyes. You would be glancing at the most energetic phenomena known in astrophysics: accreting masses around black holes, pulsars, close binaries, regions of stellar formation, explosions of supernovae, and others. I develop theoretical models for these scenarios, and test them with observations using ground-based telescopes and satellites. My research focuses on compact objects and cosmic rays. My earlier research includes gravitation and cosmology; particularly, scalar-tensor theories and non-minimal couplings, scalar dark matter, boson stars, gravitational lensing, and wormholes. I published several papers on all these topics. My research group hosted 50+ scientists since its foundation in 2006. You can know more about all this, including links to my publications, from my website, https://sites.google.com/view/dft-research
Selected publications
- Iñiguez-Pascual D, Viganò D & Torres DF 2025, 'The dispersion in pulsar γ-ray efficiency', Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters, 704 -L14.
- García CR & Torres DF 2025, 'Quantitative exploration of the similarity of gamma-ray pulsar light curves', ApJ Letters 982, L51.
- Meyer D M-A, Torres DF & Meliani Z 2025, '3D MHD simulations of runaway pulsars in core-collapse supernova remnants', Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters 696, id.L9.
- Meyer D M-A, & Torres DF 2025, 'Material mixing in pulsar wind nebulae of massive runaway stars', MNRAS 537, 186-203 (2025)
- The Fermi-LAT Collaboration (including D. F. Torres, as corresponding author); 'A Systematic Search for MeV-GeV Pulsar Wind Nebulae without Gamma-Ray Detected Pulsars', Astrophysical journal, 989 - 1 - 110.
- Iñiguez-Pascual D, Torres DF & Viganò D 2025, 'Synchro-curvature description of γ-ray light curves and spectra of pulsars: concurrent fitting', Monthly notices of the royal astronomical society, 541 - 2 - 806 - 820.
Selected research activities
Published 13 papers in small groups of authors (with students and postdocs) out of large collaborations and lead one large collaboration paper as corresponding author.
Published several other papers as a member of collaborations.
2 of my PhD students successfully defended their work this year (García, Zhang).
I am supervising 4 other PhDs, 3 postdocs, 2 engineers.
I acted as a reviewer/panel member for projects and institutes of 7 countries.
I held the Tsung-Dao Lee Visiting Professorship, Shanghai
I shared the Giuseppe & Vanna Cocconi Prize (collective award to the Fermi collaboration), by the European Physical Society.
Obtained 5.2 Million hours of supercomputing time.
Acquired 615000+ Euros in grants.
More personal and group info available from my website: https://sites.google.com/view/dft-research