Hi! Hola! Ciao! Welcome to my personal webpage
I am an astrophysicist and engineer, currently a Marie Curie Fellow in the field of Galaxy Evolution at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Tenerife (Spain).
Biography
Originally Italian, I am from Sardinia, a large and beautiful island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, often referred to as a «miniature continent». I was born in Iglesias, a town in the South-West, famous for its mining past. I lived in Quartu Sant’Elena, in the very South of Sardinia and very close to the capital city Cagliari. The «Poetto», a long beach of white sand, extending from Cagliari to Quartu, accompanied me in most activities during the first half of my life: from doing some sports such as swimming and running, to relaxing and thinking, or meeting friends for a pizza or a live concert.
After my first studies in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy), including one semester at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne (France) with an Erasmus grant, I moved to Portugal and then Spain to carry out two projects funded by the European Commission, while defining my first professional career as an engineer, in the sector of Solar Energy. In the meantime, my strong interest in Scientific Research brought me back to the University.
I obtained a degree in Fundamental Physics at the Universitat de Barcelona, and then moved to the Universidad de la Laguna, in the Canary Islands, for my last year of the degree with a SICUE exchange. I later studied my MSc in Observational Astrophysics and Instrumentation also at the Universidad de la Laguna. As an engineer, attracted by the technical aspects and hands-on work, I joined several projects in the Instrumentation Division of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and worked as a telescope operator at the Teide Observatory. After that, I started my doctoral studies in Astrophysics, at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. I obtained a Ph.D. from the Universidad de la Laguna with a thesis on the formation of thick disks in galaxies. After that, I moved to Heidelberg where I worked for four years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). I recently started my Maria Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias with the project «TraNSLate».
In my research, I investigate the formation and evolution of internal stellar structures in galaxies at different spatial scales, from small galactic nuclei to massive thick and thin disks. For that purpose, I make use mainly of stellar kinematics and populations, analyzed in two dimensions with the use of integral-field spectroscopy observations from the largest available telescopes. The rotation of stars, as well as their ages and chemical properties, bring the footprint of the past history of galaxies and can reveal how internal stellar structures formed. To help the interpretation of my observations, I compare them with high-spatial resolution numerical simulations. My Marie Curie project TraNSLate (Tracing galaxy evolution with Nuclear Structures in Late-type galaxies) focuses on a multiscale analysis of galactic centers, combining cosmological simulations at different resolutions with state-of-the-art integral-field spectroscopy observations.
I am also very interested and involved in equal-opportunity matters. I was one of the gender-equality officers at MPIA for two years and I am currently coordinating the informal group «Every Other Thursday (EOT)» at the IAC. This offers a safe and inclusive environment for networking and sharing thoughts and experiences on how gender affects our everyday work and professional career. I have joined several projects aiming at increasing the visibility of female scientists and at changing stereotypes among young people.