Graduations

Congrats to Leonardo Toti, who defended his MSc degree yesterday with a research project with us. Leonardo worked with Alex Toubiana on improving the robustness of testing GR with gravitational-wave data (waveform systematics are a tricky business indeed). Leonardo will move on with a PhD at IFAE in beautiful Barcelona, Spain.

Four BSc+MSc students just graduated with projects in our group!

• Alessandro Malfasi completed his BSc project with Pippa Cole on combining PTA data and primordial black holes (a believer!).
• Nicole Grillo got her MSc degree in Astrophysics with a project, also with Pippa Cole, on EMRIs and environmental effects.
• Olga Pietrosanti also got her Astrophysics MSc today, and she works in collaboration with Alessandro Trani (Copenhagen), Evgeni Grishin (Monash, Australia), and Clement Bonnerot (Birmingham, UK) on black holes migrating in AGN disks.
• Giovanni Giarda (…my name is Giovanni Giarda) completed his MSc project with Arianna Renzini and Costantino Pacilio on a deep learning pipeline to speed up the computation of GW stochastic backgrounds.

… congrats all!

I’m so so proud to see my PhD student Viola De Renzis defending her PhD thesis today. Viola’s thesis is titled “Gravitational-wave astronomy at the crossroads: from current to future detectors, from single events to populations” and was examined by Maya Fishbach (Toronto), Laura Sberna (Nottingham) as external referees, as well as Walter Del Pozzo (Pisa), Stephen Green (Nottingham) and Alberto Sesana (Milano-Bicocca) as defense committee members. What should I say, from the first “off you go and learn Bilby” meeting we had, to all those discussions at the board, learning how to ski, those codes that did (not) work, and that distinctive laughter across the corridor. Our group will not be the same without Viola. You turned into a great scientist: now “spacca tutti” in Marseille!

That’s me, Steve, Walter, Viola, and Alberto…

Four BSc students and one MSc student defended their research project with us this month.

• First, huge congrats to Federica Tettoni who got her MSc degree in astrophysics. She worked with Viola De Renzis and myself on labeling black holes in gravitational wave events. Such a fun problem (and we got confused so many times!).
• Rocco Giugni (BSc) worked with Matteo Boschini on finding issues in his remnant surrogate models…
• Giulia Foroni (BSc) worked with me on black-hole binary spin precession. The good old problem of the spin morphologies, but this time looking for two transitions at the same time.
• Matilde Vergani (BSc) also worked with me; we looked at merger trees and their combinatorics problem (her presentation had pictures of trees, I mean actual trees…).
• Laura Tassoni (BSc) worked with Costantino Pacilio on ringdown data analysis.

Thanks all for spending some time in our research group!

Four students just graduated with projects in our group…

First, huge congrats to Cecilia Fabbri who got her MSc in Astrophysics. Cecilia (you might remember her)worked on an exciting applied statistics problem (which has already ended up in a poem, but soon in a paper). Her problem got like 10 more people hooked beside us, so we really have to finish it now! From my side, it’s always amazing to see scientists like her growing so much. Cecilia be moving on with a PhD in Nottingham (UK) with Steve Green (and when you come back to visit you’ll tell me everything I don’t understand about simulation-based inference!). Good luck!

We also supervised three BSc students who defended their short projects:

• Matteo Pagani worked with Ssohrab Borhanian on testing Fisher Matrix codes (spoiler, it’s tricky).
• William Toscani worked with Giulia Fumagalli on eccentric binary black holes, revisiting the old “isotropic stays isotropic” problem in PN dynamics.
• Francesca Rattegni worked with Matteo “Bormio” Bonetti on how the Galaxy can cause Kozai-Lidov oscillations on wide binaries.

Congrats all, Spritz time now.

(Wearing Laurel crowns is a very Italian thing to do when graduating)

Usually my students graduate in Physics, but not this time… Together with Matteo Boschini, I had the pleasure of supervising a student majoring in Computer Science. Alessandro Crespi got his BSc degree with a project on Simulation Design, which is really a computing thing but has lots of physics applications. That was so much fun! It is truly true that putting different expertise/approaches/ideas makes things better.

Daria Gangardt has just defended her PhD thesis at the University of Birmingham. The thesis is called “Black-hole dynamics and their environments” and jumps from black-hole spins all the way to AGN discs. Daria, it has been a true pleasure working with you, all the way since your very first summer project and through your supervisor changing countries. I’m both honored and proud that you completed your PhD with me, all the best with everything. Time for drinks now! Go Dr. Daria!

Three more students graduated in March with research projects completed in our group!

• Alessandro Pedrotti defended his MSc thesis working with Michele Mancarella on gravitational-wave cosmology going from crazy calculations to fun correlations and all the way to Einstein Telescope! Alessandro is now moving on with his career with a research placement at the University of Aix-Marseille. Congrats!
• Annalisa Amigoni completed a BSc project with Ssohrab: more fun with 3g detectors…
• Alice Palladino also completed a BSc project; she worked with Viola and me on a strange and mind-twisting “ordering” problem using the LIGO posterior (how many times did we get confused on this!)

Our student Lisa Merlo defended her BSc 3rd year project today! Lisa worked with Pippa Cole and me on computing rates for mergers of primordial black holes, also considering a new detector prototype that the experimental group here is developing (nickname BAUSCIA, from the Milan dialect). Short answer: the rate is low but now is more accurately low. Lisa’s presentation was amazing and working with her has been a real pleasure. Stay tuned for her future astro career!

We had another graduation session in November, and a whopping 4 people graduated with research projects in our group. Here are the new BSc physicists who just defended:

• Matteo Falcone worked with the other Matteo (Boschini) on a simulation design strategy for machine learning;
• Serena Caslini worked with Nick on a new strategy to classify burst GW signals;
• Marco “104” Bianchi worked with Giulia and put together a neural network for black-hole binary spin precession using his gaming GPU 🙂
• Martin “Top” Gerini was supervised by Alice on supermassive black holes, LISA, and glitches.

Congrats all (and twice congrats to Marco and Serena, who graduated with full marks and honors). It was great working with you. Matteo and Martin are now enrolled in an MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence (good luck!), while Marco and Serena are starting our MSc degree in Astrophysics.

We’ve had four amazing research students graduating with us in October!

• Alessandro Santini defended his MSc project, which was actually completed in part at Johns Hopkins University (USA) with R. Cotesta and E. Berti. Alessandro worked our a possible astrophysical model to explain the mass-spin correlation observed by LIGO. We’ve published this already! Alessandro is moving on with a PhD at the AEI in Potsdam, Germany.
• Francesco Nobili also got his MSc degree. His project was completed with S. Baghwat at the University of Birmingham as is about fitting ringdown amplitudes. I discovered other students call him “Brock” from the Pokemon character, so I started doing the same… Brock is starting a PhD in computational astrophysics at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy.
• Federico Ravelli. Completed a shorter BSc project with Viola De Renzis on spin effects in LIGO/Virgo data…
• … and Simone Sferlazzo also got his Physics BSc degree. Simone worked with Michele Mancarella on “the use and abuse” (cit.) of Fisher matrices in GWs.

After the Master’s defenses, students turned the graduation party into a football supporter thing, with chants and all the rest!

Three of our BSc students graduated today.

• Ludovica Carbone worked with Michele Mancarella and Francesco Iacovellie and has some nice forecasts for 3G detectors.
• Riccardo Bosoni de Martini was supervised by Costantino Pacilio and checked super carefully their Fisher code for ringdowns.
• Malvina Bellotti (who, I’m very envious, is from Cortina in the mountains!) worked with me on selection effects for GW surveys.

And, last but not least, let me add Simone Piscitelli, who last week defended his MSc degree at Milano Statale (“the other” University of Milan) supervised by Costantino Pacilio and myself. Simone worked on a cool test of GR. Stay tuned…

Congrats all!

Two students just completed their Bachelor’s degree with research projects in our group.

• Leonardo Toti worked with myself and Giulia Fumagalli on exploring black-hole merger trees in dense clusters.
• Simone Restuccia worked with Costantino Pacilio on applying dimensionality-reduction techniques to black-hole ringdowns.

I had the honor of heading their graduation committee and could call them “physicists” for the very first time (and the Italian ceremonial sentence is quite imposing: “ coi poteri conferitami… “). Congrats Simone and Leonardo!

Please let me introduce Dr Matthew Mould… After N papers (where N is a lot) and a 4h+15min viva discussion, Matt has completed his PhD in gravitational-wave astronomy at the University of Birmingham. WooooO! The examiners were Annelies Mortier from Birmingham and Uli Sperhake from Cambridge, who went through a thesis with more than 600 references…. Matt will be continuing his already successful career with a postdoc at MIT, LIGO lab. From my side, Matt is (actually, was!) my first PhD student and spending 3+ years working with him has been amazing. Thanks, Matt for teaching me Bayesian stats and never letting go when I was saying crap.

First thing you do after a 4h 15m viva? Eat a cookie baked by Giulia!

It’s student time! Massive congratulations to two of my students who just graduated.

The star of the day is Matteo Boschini, who completed his MSc project with me after a long visit at the AEI (Postdam, Germany) to collaborate with Vijay Varma. Matteo worked out an amazing extension of current numerical-relativity surrogate models… stay tuned for a paper because this is going to be cool!

Daniele Chirico completed his BSc studies with a sweet research project on supernova explosions, orbits, and kicks. He’s staying in Milan for his MSc degree now, so wait a bit for his successes!

That’s Matteo discussing black-hole remnants

Huge congrats to two of my students who graduated today!

• Matteo Muriano completed a funny BSc project on black-hole merger trees.
• Giovanni Cavallotto went all in for his MSc research: he basically “fixed” black-hole binary spin precession at 2PN! (which is pretty cool, stay tuned for these results!).

They both defended quite brilliantly, good luck with everything now!

More graduations today! I had the pleasure to see three of my students defending their scientific work.

• Lorenzo Zanga completed his BSc project on unstable spinning black-hole binaries,
• Alessandro Carzaniga defended his MSc thesis on gaussianities in the LISA detector, and
• Alice Spadaro also presented her MSc-thesis work on the LISA mock data challenge. I

t’s so great to see students reaching the point of defending/arguing/explaining their science… I think it’s actually one of the best things about my job! Thank you all for sharing these months with me, I’ll see you around! (And thanks to Viola De Renzis and Riccardo Buscicchio who co-supervised Lorenzo, Alessandro, and Alice with me).

Here we are, from left to right: Alessandro (sorry I cut your face in half!), me trying to be funny, Riccardo, and smiling Alice! (Lorenzo and Viola had left the room earlier…)

Wooo! What an amazing performance by two of my students today, who defended their BSc and MSc degrees!

• Oliver Rossi discussed his BSc project on black holes with large spins completed in collaboration with Viola De Renzis (PhD student in my group).
• Andrea Geminardi presented the results of his MSc thesis. Andrea studied the stochastic gravitational-wave background with myself, Riccardo Buscicchio (postdoc here in Milan), and Arianna Renzini (postdoc at Caltech).

Hope you guys had fun working with us, we certainly did! (and I’m sorry for my pain-in-the-*** comments on your plots…). All the best for what comes next!

Huge congrats to my student Cecilia Fabbri who got her Bachelor’s degree today. Cecilia defended (quite brilliantly!) her project titled “Constraining the black-hole irreducible mass with current gravitational-wave data”. Her work ended up in our recent draft (arxiv:2202.08848). Cecilia is continuing with a Master’s degree in astrophysics at Milano-Bicocca, stay tuned for her future successes!

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.

Congratulations to my Master’s students that graduate this year: **Abdullah Aziz** and Julian Chan from the University of Birmingham, and Beatrice Basset from the University of Lyon. Well done all, and good luck with your future adventures.