About Me
I am a Staff Scientist in the Observational Cosmology Group at Caltech as of August 2016. I am an experimental cosmologist and an observational extragalactic astronomer. My main research interests are: the physics of the early Universe, Inflation, the primordial gravitational wave background, and reionization, as probed by Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization measurements; the origin of the Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB); the evolution of distant massive galaxies, both star-forming and quiescent; the physical processes responsible for active galactic nucleus (AGN) emission and their interplay with the star-forming activity of host galaxies. These science goals have been driving and complementing my interests in astronomical instrumentation over the past decade (Rome -> Cardiff -> Pasadena).
BICEP Array continues the BICEP/Keck program of degree-scale CMB polarization observations and will measure the polarized sky from the South Pole in five frequency bands (spanning 30-270 GHz) to reach an ultimate sensitivity of σ(r) < 0.005.
TIME is a new mm-wavelength grating spectrometer array designed to study the Epoch of Reionization by mapping the fluctuations of the redshifted 157.7 μm emission line of singly ionized carbon ([CII]) from redshift z ~ 5 to 9 (observing range 199-305 GHz).
SPIDER is a balloon-borne experiment designed to search for the primordial gravitational waves predicted by inflationary theories by means of measuring their imprint on the CMB as an extremely faint curl-mode of polarization.