J. Méndez-Abreu is a world-recognised expert in the analysis of stellar structures in galaxies. The study of bulges and discs was the topic of his PhD thesis. Part of his work has challenged the validity of

popular diagnostics for distinguishing merger-built (classical) from secularly-built (disc-like) bulges (Méndez-Abreu et al. 2014, 2018; Costantin et al. 2018), while his analysis of low-mass bulges seemed

to indicate that they may be the descendants of red nuggets: compact objects observed at high redshift that are consistently produced in cosmological CDM models (Costantin et al. 2017, 2020; Méndez-

Abreu et al. 2021). These works were the seed of the BEARD survey.