I am interested in Cosmology because there are many open questions that we are beginning to answer with unprecedented precision. My research focuses on the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) — the oldest light in the universe — as a window onto inflation, dark energy, and the large-scale structure of the cosmos.

I am an Associate Professor at the Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Catania (which is also my home town!), where I joined the Astrophysics group at the Observatory and started teaching both graduate and undergraduate students. Before that I worked as a staff researcher at the University of Rome – Tor Vergata, in the cosmology group led by Nicola Vittorio and Marina Migliaccio. I spent ~5 years in my beloved California as a PostDoc at UC Berkeley (Center for Computational Cosmology, led by Julian Borrill) and at KIPAC (Stanford University, CMB group led by Chao-Lin Kuo). Thanks to this experience, I got actively involved in several CMB experiments: Simons Observatory, CMB-S4, and LiteBIRD. I currently serve as SO pipeline leader for Galactic and Extragalactic science, and as Simulation Production Manager for LiteBIRD. My work spans systematics assessment (gain drifts, beam effects), foreground modelling, and map-making algorithms.

I am actively building an observational cosmology group at UniCT. If you are interested in working on CMB data analysis, foreground modelling, or instrumentation — as a PhD student, postdoc, or collaborator — feel free to reach out.

I graduated in Astrophysics at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste in October 2017, working on CMB data analysis under the supervision of Carlo Baccigalupi and Giulio Fabbian. In December 2016 I also obtained a Master in High Performance Computing (MHPC) at SISSA/ICTP, focused on parallel programming, large-data manipulation, and scientific computing.

Skills