Awards

Happy to share I was just awarded a grant from the Università Italo Francese / Université Franco Italienne (UIF/UFI), a joint institution supported by the Italian and French governments to foster academic collaborations between the two countries. My proposal is titled ``Populations of compact objects for next-generation gravitational-wave detectors’’ and was submitted jointly with Michele Mancarella’s group at the University of Aix-Marseille. We have been awarded funds under the “UIF/UFI Vinci 2025 - Chapter 3” grant solicitation. This award will fully support a joint PhD student between our two institutions.

The 2017 paper “Are merging black holes born from stellar collapse or previous mergers? ” that I wrote with Emanuele Berti was selected 2025 Frontiers of Science Award. These prizes are awarded by the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS), sponsored by the City of Beijing and the Yanqi Lake Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Application (BIMSA). Every year, they select influential recent papers in Physics, Maths, and Computer Science.

The complete list of Physics papers selected for awards is available here. Ours is one of only three papers that were selected in the category Astrophysics and Cosmology – Theory. We’ll collect the award in July at the Great Hall of the People of China in Beijing.

I’m so happy to see how a seemingly simple idea we had (“What if LIGO’s black holes merge multiple times?”) went so far! Our paper was published in Physical Review D in 2017, selected as an Editor’s Suggestion back then… and now got an award!

Huge congrats to Arianna Renzini and Nick Loutrel who won two of this year’s “Giovani Talenti” (Young Talents) prizes from the University of Milano-Bicocca. These are internal grants for postdocs: there were four grants awarded in Physics in total and two of them are from our group! Let’s gooooooooooo

Huge huge congrats to Zacharias Roupas who was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship with us! Zachos is currently based at the British University in Egypt and will be joining my group in Milan in the Fall of 2024. The Marie Curie Fellowship program is a prestigious postdoctoral scheme operating at the EU level and, together with Arianna, we’ll now have two Marie Curie grantees in the group. Zachos’ winning proposal is titled “Black hole spin and mass function in gaseous proto-clusters” (nickname: protoBH).

Looks like my name is on a list of the 2% top scientists worldwide. Take these rankings with a grain (or a block) of salt… but this is kind of cool! The list was compiled by Stanford University and bounced by our press office.

Happy to report we got a grant from the Italian PRIN program! This is in collaboration with Andrea Maselli from GSSI in L’Aquila. The title is “Gravitational-wave astronomy as a mature field: characterizing selection biases and environmental effects”. Stay tuned for more research (and more positions to join our group!).

I was just awarded a large allocation on the Italian national supercomputer at CINECA. My PhD student Viola De Renzis (our parameter-estimation expert!) is the co-I on our proposal. Our award is part of the so-called ISCRA Class B program (which is their medium-size allocation scheme) and amounts to 1.2M CPUh on the Galileo cluster (that is: we’re going to have to crunch a ton of numbers now!). Viola and I will study the extraction of spin-spin couplings from black-hole binaries using gravitational-wave data and stochastic sampling techniques. Stay tuned!

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 problem“, though arguably a better title could have been “more black-hole fun coming our way”!

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 in my home country; it’s great to be back! Let me thank all my mentors, advisors, collaborators, and now students who are walking with me in the adventure of science.

Here is me with the president of the society Fulvio Ricci. And here are press releases from the University of Milan-Bicocca and the INFN.

We just received our new computing servers (thanks Royal Society). These are two machines of 96 cores each and a ton of RAM, and will support our activities in computational astrophysiscs. Their nicknames are xwing and tiefighter. Huge thanks David Stops for helping with the setup.

I am truly honored to receive this year’s research prize of the Italian Culture Ministry and the Lincei National Academy. The prize is given to Italian researchers in various fields, and this year was awarded in the physical sciences. For more information see here (click on “Premio Ministro della Cultura”).

I was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for my program titled “Gravitational-wave data mining”. My team and I will look into gravitational-wave data, machine-learning tools, black-hole binary dynamics, stellar-evolution simulations, etc. The total awarded amount is 1.5M EUR. Here is the press release from the Birmingham news office.

Thank you Europe, you’re great.

I am the recipient of the 2020 IUPAP General Relativity and Gravitation Young Scientist Prize. The prize is awarded by the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (ISGRG) through its affiliation with the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) to “recognize outstanding achievements of scientists at early stages of their career”.

The citation reads: “ For his outstanding contributions to gravitational-wave astrophysics, including new tests of general relativity. “

A huge thank you to all my supervisors and advisors who supported me in these past years. For more see the Birmingham press release, the Springer press release, and the IUPAP newsletter.

I was recently awarded a research grant from the Royal Society (woooo!). My research proposal is titled “The supermassive black-hole binary puzzle: putting the pieces together.” This was in response of a solicitation for early career scientists who are establishing their research group.

My Leverhulme Trust grant proposal titled “Black-hole spins and accretion discs with gravitational waves from space” has been selected for funding (PI Davide Gerosa, University of Birmingham). The total awarded amount is GBP 191,417 over 3 years.

I was selected by the European Space Agency to join the Voyage 2050 Topical Teams. Voyage 2050 is ESA’s long-term programmatic plan to select scientific missions to be launched between 2035 and 2050. I am part of the review panel tasked to evaluate mission proposals focussed on “ The Extreme Universe, including gravitational waves, black holes, and compact objects “.

This summer I’ll be working with two undergraduate research students. Luca Reali is finishing his master at my alma mater (University of Milan, Italy) and is visiting Birmingham with a scholarship from the HPC Europa 3 cluster. Daria Gangardt just finished her 3rd year in Birmingham. Their projects concentrate on spin effects in black hole binaries and the properties of merger remnants. Welcome Daria and Luca, hope you’ll have a very rewarding summer!

The COST action GWverse is an impressive network of European researchers and institutions tackling gravitational waves, black holes, etc (i.e. the things I like… sweet!). Together with conferences and outreach, they support collaborative visits between the network members, so here we come. Hey wait a minute, Caltech is kind of far from Europe isn’t it? Here’s the news: Caltech is now an international partner of GWverse, and we’re very happy to host European researchers who want to collaborate with us in sunny southern California.

We’re having our first visitors. Serguei Ossokine from the AEI, is here to work with me on a black-hole binary spin project. Yann Bouffanais from University of Padova (Italy) is coming to collaborate on formation channels. Welcome Serguei and Yann, and thanks to COST for supporting our science!

I was recently awarded the 2018 Giulio Rampa Thesis Prize for Outstanding Research in General Relativity. The prize is sponsored by the University of Pavia (Italy) and the Italian Society for Relativity and Gravitational Physics (SIGRAV), and was officially awarded at the 23rd SIGRAV Conference. The prize announcement reads:

Dr. Gerosa’s Ph.D. Thesis on “Source modelling at the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy” shows an impressive ability to master a rather broad range of topics in relativistic astrophysics and gravitational wave physics. The research initiated by Dr. Gerosa in these areas has triggered follow-up work, providing new important insights and new physical scenarios. The large impact that the work of Dr. Gerosa has already had can only continue to grow.

I was awarded the 2016 Stefano Braccini PhD Thesis Prize by the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC). The prize announcement reads:

Dr. Gerosa received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and was nominated by his adviser, Prof. Ulrich Sperhake. Dr. Gerosa’s thesis includes a wide variety of topics relevant to gravitational waves, as well as other topics in astrophysics: astrophysical explorations of accretion disks, analytically challenging work in mathematical relativity and post-Newtonian theory, and numerical relativity coding of supernova core-collapse in relativity and modified gravity.

The prize was officially awarded at the 12th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves. Here is a picture tweeted by Salvo :

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!

I was awarded a NASA Einstein Fellowship to conduct three years of postdoctoral research at Caltech. My proposal is titled “Strong gravity to the realm of observational astronomy”. Here is a passage from NASA’s press release:

“We are very pleased to welcome this talented group of young scientists as the incoming Einstein Fellows,” said Belinda Wilkes, Director of the Chandra X-ray Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory that manages the Einstein Fellows program for NASA. “Their research will advance the quest to better understand the physics of the cosmos in a variety of directions.”

Sunny California, here I come!