I am a research director of the CNRS and leader of the cosmology group COS (Cosmology: Origin & Structures) at the Laboratoire Univers et Théorie of the Paris Observatory. I am member of the Euclid mission consortium. I also contribute to several international collaborations such as the CHEX-MATE program and the consortium of The300 project.
Over the past twenty years my research has primarily focused on open problems in cosmology and extragalactic astrophysics. Since joining the CNRS, I have developed an active research program devoted to the study of the invisible components in the universe, dark energy and dark matter, through the realisation and analysis of numerical simulations of the cosmic structure formation. This has been especially possible thanks to a Starting Grant of 1.5 M€ from the European Research Council, which I was awarded for the project “Exploring Dark Energy through Cosmic Structures” (EDECS).
I begun my research in cosmology at the Physics Department of University of Rome “La Sapienza”, where I graduated in Physics with a thesis on the non-Gaussian signatures of topological defects on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, under the supervision of Prof. Franco Occhionero and Prof. Luca Amendola. I pursued my studies at the University of Sussex at Brighton, where I obtained a PhD in Physics with a thesis devoted to the study of the phenomenology of non-standard dark energy dominated scenarios, under the supervision of Prof. Ed Copeland. After graduating, I moved to Columbia University in New York, where I worked as research fellow in the Institute of String, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics directed by Prof. Brian Greene and Prof. Arlin Crotts at the Physics and Astronomy Department. I was then hired by the CNRS as a staff researcher and joined the Observatory of Paris.
Besides academic research I am also interested in a variety of topics in computational physics with applications to biophysics, finance and bayesian statistical data analysis. In my spare time I cultivate many hobbies including music, literature and strategy games.