Background
I was born in Switzerland. After my MS degree in Mathematics at the University of Perugia (Italy, 1991), I received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Bern (Switzerland, 1996) for work in semiclassical solutions of Einstein's equations. Soon after my PhD, I joined the relativity group at University of Utah where I began my research in the area of binary black hole coalescence modeling using black hole perturbation theory. I carried out my next post-doctoral work in one of the largest numerical relativity groups in the world at the Albert-Einstein Institute (AEI) and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm in Germany. At the AEI I was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to develop a new research project, called the Lazarus approach to binary black hole modeling.
In January of 2002, I joined the faculty at Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College (UTB/TSC) where I am now an Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy (CGWA).
In 2001, I became involved in the direction of the Education and Outreach effort of two major NSF projects: Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) and International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL). These form a consortium of 15 universities, four national laboratories, and several participating foreign institutions connected by the world's first global "computational grid," providing a computational resource at the petabyte scale and beyond for major scientific experiments in physics, astronomy, biology, and engineering, including those conducted at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). You can find more about these projects at the GriPhyN Outreach Center.
