January 20, 2022
Traveling is (kind of) coming back, and we’re having lots of visitors around, all supported by external research grants (congrats folks, you’re great!) Daria Gangardt is visiting Milan from Birmingham for 6 months from January to July, supported by a … Continue reading
January 7, 2022
I’m very happy to share that I was awarded a 330k EUR grant from the Cariplo Foundation. Cariplo is a trust that supports scientific research in the Lombardy region of Italy. Our proposal is titled “Deep into the relativistic two-body … Continue reading
December 6, 2021
My group and I are now part of TEONGRAV, which is the Italian national initiative dedicated to gravitational theory and phenomenology. TEONGRAV is run by the INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) and, besides the other folks here in Milan, … Continue reading
November 17, 2021
Breaking things is fun! In the previous paper of this series, we looked at accretion disks around massive black-hole binaries and found things were going awry. We kept on finding configurations that our implementation could not handle… And now we … Continue reading
October 13, 2021
Great Scott, a new paper! When analyzing gravitational-wave data, looking at one black hole at a time is not enough anymore, the fun part is looking at them all together. The issue Matt and I are tackling here is that … Continue reading
October 11, 2021
Nathan Steinle is officially starting his postdoc in the group today! Nate graduated with Mike Kesden at the University of Texas at Dallas and is now working with me and the rest of the Birmingham crowd. Welcome Nate! Hope you … Continue reading
October 4, 2021
The University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy) invites expressions of interest for postdoctoral positions in gravitational-wave astronomy. Successful candidates will join Prof. Davide Gerosa and will constitute the core team of the “GWmining” project funded by the European Research Council. Targeted investigations … Continue reading
September 18, 2021
Viola De Renzis is the latest addition to our group! Viola graduated from Rome “La Sapienza” with an MSc thesis on exotic compact objects and is now starting her PhD with me at Milan-Bicocca. Viola plays guitar, arguably better than … Continue reading
September 8, 2021
It is a true honor to receive the career Prize for Young Researchers of the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitational Physics (SIGRAV). I was awarded the prize in the class of relativistic astrophysics. It’s amazing to be recognized … Continue reading
September 1, 2021
We moved! I’ve had the opportunity to relocate to Milan, in the north of Italy, very close to where I’m from. I’m now an Associate Professor at the University of Milan-Bicocca, one of the two campuses in the beautiful city … Continue reading
August 6, 2021
No black hole is an island entire of itself. We’ve got many gravitational wave events now. One can look at each of them individually (aka “parameter estimation”), all of them together (aka “population”), or each of them individually while they’re … Continue reading
July 14, 2021
Huge congrats to Maciej (Max) Dabrowny, who just graduated from the University of Birmingham after a very successful research project with us (Max’s project ended up in a paper!). Well done and all the best for the future.
July 11, 2021
I was recently interviewed for the Italian Week of Astronomy (“Settimana dell’Astronomia”), a science festival organized by Fondazione Lombardia per l’Ambiente and supported by various Italian associations, universities, and research centers. Here is the nice clip they put together (I … Continue reading
June 24, 2021
Today we go deep into the perilous world of binary population synthesis! Using Nicola’s code MOBSE, our master student Maciej has implemented some new prescriptions for how supernovae explode and produce compact objects. In practice, we use the compactness (that’s … Continue reading
June 10, 2021
We have a new friend in the group! Meredith Vogel is joining us for her undergraduate summer research project. Meredith is e-visiting us from Missouri State University (but will soon start her grad school at the University of Florida*) and … Continue reading
June 10, 2021
LISA is going to be great and will detect stuff from white dwarfs to those supermassive black-hole that live at the center of galaxies. If we’re lucky (yeah, who knows how many of these we will see), LISA might also … Continue reading
May 27, 2021
Who are the parents of LIGO’s black holes? Stars, most likely. Things like those we see in the sky at night will eventually surrender to gravity and collapse. Some of them will form black holes. Some of them will form … Continue reading
May 18, 2021
The University of Milano-Bicocca welcomes applications for Ph.D. scholarships. The application deadline is June 16th, 2021 for positions to start later in 2021: https://en.unimib.it/education/doctoral-research-phd-programmes/how-apply-phd-programme In particular, I am looking for a strong, highly motivated candidate to join my newly established research … Continue reading
May 11, 2021
The quest of finding their astrophysical origin of merging black-hole binaries is now a key open problem in modern astrophysics. Stars are the natural progenitor of black holes: at the end of their lives, the core collapses and leaves behind … Continue reading
September 2, 2016
Today I’ve defended my PhD at the University of Cambridge! My thesis is titled “Source modelling at the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy” (with two l’s, British spelling here!). Huge thanks Uli and everyone else for the journey!