Please find a compact and potentially out-of-date CV below
A reasonably up-to-date full Vita & Bibliography in pdf
format is available here
I was born in
Montebelluna,
a small town in North-Eastern Italy, about 50 km from both Venezia and
Padova, on 23 January 1975.
From 1988 to 1993 I attended the
"Primo Levi" High School,
in Montebelluna, from which in 1993 I received a First-Class Honour (60/60)
Diploma of Scientific Studies (the Italian "Diploma di Maturità
Scientifica").
In 1993 I enrolled in Physics at the
University of Padova,
where in 1998 I started to major in Astronomy.
From the Summer of 1998 to the Summer of 2000 my main research project has
been the GAIA Galaxy Survey, a study about the observation of galaxies
with GAIA, a scientific
satellite mission proposed to the
European Space Agency (ESA).
In October 2000, GAIA
was selected by ESA for a launch in
2010-2012 (No, it's not a typo: these things take a loooong time!),
and the GAIA Galaxy Survey has been included between its baseline
science observations.
With a thesis on this subject,
on 17 July 2000 I received a First-Class Honour ("summa cum laude", or
"110/110 e lode") Master of Science in Physics (the Italian "Laurea
in Fisica") from the University of Padova.
From October 1998 to August 1999, with the support of a
Socrates-Erasmus studentship, I have been studying at the
Astronomical Observatory
of Copenhagen University
under the supervision of
Erik Høg.
From November 1999 to the Summer of 2000, I have been studying at the
Asiago Astrophysical Observatory
under the supervision of Pier Luigi Bernacca of the
Department of Astronomy and
Antonio Saggion of the
Department of Physics "Galileo Galilei".
From November 2000 to October 2003 I've been employed as a PhD student at the
Center of Studies and Activities for Space
(CISAS) "Giuseppe Colombo" and at the
Department of Astronomy of the
University of Padova, under the supervision
of Alberto Franceschini.
My research project focused on mid-infrared data analysis and
instrumentation, an exciting field in which several space missions are
presently underway.
More specifically, I've been working on the development and
application of the LARI Method, a new technique
for the reduction and analysis of imaging data obtained with ISOCAM
and ISOPHOT, the two cameras onboard the
ISO satellite, jointly
developed by ESA, NASA and ISAS, that has operated from 1995 to 1998.
This method, painstakingly developed by Carlo Lari of the
Institute of Radio Astronomy
Italian National Research Council,
in Bologna, has proven one of the most powerful and reliable tools
for the detection of faint sources in this kind of data,
overcoming the problems caused by cosmic ray hits and transient
behaviour of the detector.
With a thesis on this subject,
on 21 May 2004 I received a PhD in Space Science and Technology.
from the University of Padova.
At the same time, in collaboration with people involved in the related
consortia, I've been dealing with simulations for future infrared
satellite missions (SIRTF, SOFIA, ASTRO-F/IRIS, FIRST/HSO, NGST/JWST)
in order to evaluate the results to be expected from these in terms of
instrumental performance and related scientific yield.
From November 2003 to September 2005 I've been employed as a Post Doctoral
Research Associate within the Astrophysics Group
at Imperial College, London, UK
working on a variety of infrared/sub-mm
extragalactic survey and follow-up projects exploiting?both ground-based
and space-based facilities (Follow-up of ISO and Spitzer sources, SWIRE,
SHADES) and on Observation Planning and Software Development for the SPIRE
camera on board the Herschel satellite, scheduled for launch in 2008.
In September 2005 I moved back to Padova and my "Alma Mater", where I'm
continuing work on SWIRE and SHADES as well as on science planning for
Herschel.
A little more about these topics can be found here.
I have a good knowledge of the most popular
Unix-like and (alas!) M$ Windows
operating systems, as well as of the most common applications in these
environments. In particular, over the years I've worked on and/or administered
machines running a wide variety of Unix flavours, such as Solaris, Digital Unix,
RedHat, Mandrake, Debian and Mac OS X. While I've kept on being exposed to
a bewildering variety of operating systems, since 2004 I've myself mostly used
the funky Unix shipped with Apple computers and known as Mac OS X.
My favourite programming and visualization tool is
IDL, (Interactive Data Language),
a general-purpose and still easy-to-use language with excellent built-in
graphical capabilities, allowing development of CPU-intensive programs
and plotting of results in the same environment, thus ideally suited
for the interactive analysis of scientific data.
I then have a somewhat more limited experience in scripting languages such as
Jython,
Perl and
Python
as well as in high-level languages such as
Fortran,
C and
Java.
I also enjoy a fair amount of Unix shell programming, mostly
in order to exploit the wealth of utilities that usually come along
with this most versatile operating system.
I have a keen interest in TeX,
LaTeX and
LaTeX2HTML,
which together allow simple and high-quality typesetting of
both printed texts and web pages with lots of formulae, tables and
figures from the same source code. Take a look at the HTML versions of
my Master Thesis and
PhD Thesis to see what LaTeX2HTML
output looks like.
I enjoy writing both static and dynamic web pages, using tools such as
HTML, JavaScript, CGIs, PHP...) and imposing these efforts of mine on
others :-) In so doing, I also happened to maintain a few web pages of
the groups/projects I've been working with.
| CV | Research | Papers | Talks/Posters | Meetings | Schools |
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| ELAIS | LARI | SMOG | SOS | IDL | myidllib | malavita | simstuff | Presentations |
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