David Aguado is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias specializing in stellar archaeology and early chemical evolution in the Universe. His research focuses on identifying and characterizing the oldest and most metal-poor stars in the Milky Way to reconstruct the formation history of the Galaxy and constrain nucleosynthetic processes in the first stellar generations.

His work combines high-resolution stellar spectroscopy, atmospheric modeling, and the exploitation of large spectroscopic surveys. During his PhD at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, he discovered some of the most metal-poor dwarf stars known, including objects whose lithium abundances challenge predictions from standard cosmology. These discoveries provided key constraints on early stellar nucleosynthesis and primordial chemical enrichment.

He later expanded his research at the University of Cambridge, integrating stellar chemistry and Galactic dynamics to study accretion events that shaped the Milky Way, such as Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus and Sequoia. He has also played an active role in next-generation spectroscopic surveys, contributing to the scientific development of WEAVE, DESI, and 4MOST, and developing analysis tools for extracting chemical abundances from large stellar datasets.

During his postdoctoral work at the University of Florence, he combined observational spectroscopy with cosmological modeling to search for chemical signatures of the first supernovae, including Pair Instability Supernovae.

Currently, his research focuses on exploiting high-resolution facilities and large spectroscopic surveys to study early element production and the first stellar populations. He leads the ERC Starting Grant OUTLIERS (started 2026), aimed at identifying the most primitive stars and reconstructing the physical processes governing star formation in the early Universe.