I am a Level III (Senior) ESA/AURA Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, U.S.A.
I also hold an appointment as Research Scientist in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the Johns Hopkins University.
My work time is equally divided into a functional part and a research part. On the functional side, I work for the Hubble Space Telescope and I am a member of the ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys) Team.
My scientific interests are mainly focused on Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and supermassive black holes.
I also lead the MJ2020 project on human spaceflight research, which was originally funded with a Space@Hopkins seed grant. This is a multi-disciplinary project involving researchers and students at the JHU Physics and Astronomy Department, JHU School of Medicine, the JHU Biology Department and the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution for Science. As part of this research, we study the effects of micro-gravity on joint cartilage and the goal is to find the optimal countermeasures to facilitate long duration human spaceflight. Results and updates on this new exciting project will be available soon.
Here's our latest NASA press release on interesting general (and special) relativity effects we observed with Hubble around a supermassive black hole link.
Our latest paper on the gravitational wave recoiling black hole candidate 3C 186 was published in the Astrophysical Journal. Here's a link to the ADS webpage for this paper. Here's a link to the NASA-HUBBLE press release that was issued after the discovery was announced in 2017.
I graduated in Physics in 1997 from University of Torino, Italy. Then I moved to SISSA/ISAS in Trieste, Italy for graduate school, where I got my PhD in Astrophysics with a thesis on the nuclear regions of low redshift radio galaxies as seen with the Hubble Space Telescope.
I was a postdoc at SISSA/ISAS for 6 months in 2000-2001 then I moved to STScI where I was ESA FELLOW between 2001 and 2003.
From 2001 to 2015 I held a tenured research position at INAF-IRA in Bologna, Italy. I have been at STScI since 2005 with an ESA/AURA Astronomer III (senior) position, working on the Hubble Space Telescope.