Amina
Helmi

Amina Helmi was born in Bahia Blanca, Argentina, and studied astronomy at the University of La Plata. In 1996 she emigrated to the Netherlands and embarked on a PhD at the University of Leiden to study the formation of the Milky Way in the context of cosmology. After a few years as a postdoctoral researcher, she moved to the Kapteyn Institute in Groningen, becoming a professor in 2012.

Already during her PhD, Helmi predicted and then discovered streams of stars in the Milky Way caused by the accretion of smaller galaxies within the galactic halo. She went on to better understand dwarf galaxies, merger dynamics and the distribution of dark matter around our galaxy. It was then in 2018 that she discovered and characterised a striking event in the history of the Milky Way: its violent merger with what she was to call the Gaia-Enceladus galaxy. By combining the motions and properties of stars measured by ESA's Gaia satellite with chemical data from the APOGEE survey, she and her colleagues were able to work out when the merger happened, how big it was and what effect it had on the galactic disc present at the time.

Helmi has received numerous awards in her career. These include the Spinoza Prize from the Dutch Research Council in 2019 and the Brouwer Award from the American Astronomical Society in 2021. She has been a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2017, and a knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion since 2021.