What follows is my life story in a nutshell. Explore the website to learn more!
I was born in Taranto, a city in the far south of Italy, with beautiful beaches and outstanding food. On the outskirts of the city, there were few street lights and many stars.
When I was a kid, my parents gifted me a tiny telescope, with which I started to observe (and draw!) the Moon and Mars and study meteor showers. When I was 12, I began visiting an amateur astronomical observatory (dedicated to Isaac Newton) in the inland, built by an elementary school teacher named Cosimo Distratis. His passion for teaching was immensely beneficial to me. I wrote a newspaper article to remember his life and tremendous contribution to scientific outreach in a significantly underdeveloped area of Italy. In the same period, when I was in high school, I also developed a method to calculate the parallax of nearby objects, which was highlighted in a book by the Italian Ministry of Education.
After high school, I moved to Rome to study Physics and Astrophysics with Paolo De Bernardis (on the Cosmic Microwave Background) and Roberto Capuzzo Dolcetta (on stellar systems). Then, I moved to Pisa for my Ph.D. at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, working in the Cosmology group with Andrea Ferrara. My Thesis was a groundbreaking study on the observational properties of black hole seeds, and it received a prize from the International Astronomical Union.
Fast forward, I am now an Astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, holding the Clay and BHI Fellowships. My research stands at the intersection between theory and observations of “all things black holes”: from local ones to the farthest ever discovered, from the small to the supermassive ones. I am an expert in black hole seeding models, high-redshift quasars, local intermediate and supermassive black holes, and wandering black holes. Many of my investigations led to massive press coverage worldwide, including in the New York Times.
In my research, I use analytical tools, cosmological simulations (such as IllustrisTNG and Astrid), and machine learning. I am the Principal Investigator of many observational programs with JWST, Chandra, HST, VLA, and SMA.
I am very interested in the development of future observatories. For this reason, I am on the Science Team of AXIS (a probe-class X-ray observatory) and the AGN Steering Committee of Habitable World Observatory, NASA’s next flagship mission.
I am also a science educator for TED, for which I created ten educational videos about astronomy. I am also a regular writer for Scientific American. I am particularly active in serving the community at large. After becoming a U.S. citizen in 2022, I became interested in policy issues regarding international students and scholars in this country. For this reason, I am a member of the American Astronomical Society’s working group on international students and researchers in astronomy.