Fiorella Castelli and her legacy

Abstract

Fiorella Castelli devoted most of her scientific career to the modelisation of stellar atmospheres and the study of stellar spectra, with focus on stellar abundances. Early on she began to develop her own spectrosynthesis code SYNTH. She was an early user of the ATLAS model-atmosphere code and began to collaborate R.L. Kurucz debugging the code and contributing to its developement. She was always ready to share her knowledge with others and was a key figure in the evolution of the field that from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s transformed the use of model atmospheres and synthetic spectra from a niche, reserved to a few initiated, to a main stream research topic and widespread tool for the analysis of stellar spectra. Sadly Fiorella left us on July 26th 2019. Some of us have benefited from Fiorella’s collaboration and guidance, many more have benefited from what she shared through her web site.