About

I am a Research Scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics where I spend most of my time reducing and interpreting the data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and leading the Simons Observatory Data Managment group.

In 2016 I have spent 2 year as Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Physics at Princeton University, surpervised by Jo Dunkley.
In August 2016, I earned a doctoral degree in Physics under the guidance of Arthur Kosowsky at the University of Pittsburgh. Before moving to the US, I have pursued my undergraduate studies at 'La Sapienza' University of Rome (Italy).

You can read more about my career and my life at "Meet the Simons Observatory Scientist".

Download my CV

Research Interests

I mainly focus on data-driven analyses with the goal of testing physics on cosmologcal scales with Cosmic Microwave Backgorund (CMB) data. I am heavily involved in the low-level reduction of CMB data (see more in the "Projects" section below), and I spend most of my time leading the Data Managment group for the Simons Observatory.

Projects

I started working on CMB cosmology as an undergraduate and I find myself still cultivating this passion. Below a summary of my current and past research projects.

Atacama Cosmology Telescope

ACT is a 6-meter millimeter polarimeter in the Atacama Desert (Chile). It currently observes 40 percent of the sky at arcminute resolution, collecting state-of-the-art data used to infer the properties of our cosmos.

I am involved in many aspects of the data reduction and cosmological analysis. Above all, I make maximum-likelihood maps from the raw data, which are the starting point of our cosmological analyses.

Picture by Jon Ward

Learn more about ACT Go to relevant papers

Simons Observatory

Simons Observtory (SO) is the next millimeter observatory that is taking place in the Atacama Desert. Joint effort between the ACT and PolarBear collaborations and funded by the Sim$ Learn more about SO

Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich

Massive clusters separated by less 150 Mpc tend to attract each other due to gravity. This motion leaves a doppler-like imprint in the CMB photons that scatter off of the hot intra-cluster electrons, known as kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. This tiny signal can be detected in the ACT maps and can be used to measure the pair-wise momentum of these structures.

In the future, we will be able to use kSZ measurements to probe gravity, dark energy, and neutrinos.

Go to relevant papers

CMB Large-scale Anomalies

The statistical distribution and brightness of the CMB temperature fluctuations on large scales seem to mildly disagree with the expectations from ΛCDM. This could hint to new physics either in the inflationary epoch or in the dark energy sector, however assessing the significance of these so-called anomalies is ground for vibrant discussions.

Using different cosmological probes other than CMB temperature fluctuations is the next valuable step to shed light on these anomalies.

Picture by Planck Team

Go to relevant papers

Pubblicatons and Talks

For up-to-date publication lists with stats, please visit arχiv, iNSPIRE, Google Scholar, or follow the link below where you can find by-contribution and by-topic lists.

Go to Full Publication List

Follow the link below for a complete list of my talks. You will also find PDFs of some recent presentations.

Go to Talks List