ABOUT ME
I am a lecturer at Cardiff University, working on transient astronomy. I am the Principal Investigator of the most recent extension of the Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey for Transient Objects plus (ePESSTO+, 150 nights awarded by ESO), as well as one of the eight leaders of the original survey (PESSTO) and its first extension (ePESSTO). I am a LSST:UK PI and a member of LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, LSST transient group, the Euclid Consortium, and X-Shooter instrument scientist in the ENGRAVE consortium, which focus on the electromagnetic follow-up of gravitational waves. I am also leading the Fast and Dark Side of Transient (FDST) experiment at the Liverpool Telescope together with Dr. C.P. Gutierrez. I am passionate about big data and machine learning techniques applied in astronomy. I am also an Athena SWAN panellist.
I am an Italian native speaker. I also speak fluent English (I have a Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) from the Cambridge English language assessment) and I am slowly learning Spanish and Japanese.
I like fantasy and sci-fi, I am also a decent football goalkeeper (according to the rumours), supporting AC Milan. I also like to play volleyball as a setter or libero and in the past I played Olympic handball (at professional level) for the Belfast team (7th placement at the Irish cup 2015), as well as water polo and field hockey.
I love animals, cooking (especially cakes) and writing (usually novels).
I am a paragon of clichés since pizza is my favourite food and star wars my favourite movie.
EDUCATION
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Superluminous supernovae
Physics in the nearby Universe and use as high redshift probes
2009 - 2012
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Catania (Italy) & University of Oklahoma (USA as 1 year visitor). Thesis:
Luminous Early - Interactive Core Collapse Supernovae
Future instrumentations
Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), ESA Euclid Telescope, European-Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), SOn of X-Shooter (SOXS)
Fast transients and machine learning
Uncommon rapidly evolving transients and machine learning architectures to identify and classify transients from photometric data only
2006 - 2008
Master's Degree in Physics and Astronomy
University of Catania. Thesis: Analysis of galactics rotational curves with models of modied gravity
2003 - 2006
Bachelor's Degree in Physics
University of Catania. Thesis: Luminosity of a star in the nal stages of the gravitational collapse