Astrophysics meets articificial intelligence: a stellar combination

Michela Mapelli is Associate Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UniPD and is the supervisor of Mario Pasquato, MSCA Fellow at the same Department.

Michela has a very successful career, working in several Universities and Research centers in Europe and being awarded with several prizes. Among those, in 2015 she received the MERAC prize for the best early-career researcher in Theoretical Astrophysics by the European Astronomical Society. Most importantly, from 2017 she has been the PI of the ERC consolidator grant “DEMOBLACK” (Demography of black hole binaries in the era of gravitational wave astronomy), which aims to shed light on the formation channels of binary black holes.

Mario Pasquato received his Ph.D. in Physics from Pisa University in 2010 and then he worked all over the world (USA, Korea, United Arab Emirates, and Italy). At a certain point of his career he fell in love with machine learning and his latest research consists in applying machine learning techniques to cosmology, planetary and particle astrophysics. This is also the main obejective for his MSCA project “RISING” (Realistic and Informative Simulations with machine learnING), a global Fellowship which bring him first to the University of Montreal for a two-years outgoing phase and then to Padua one year.

Pietro Osti, UniPD Communication Office, interviewed Michela and Mario to find out how they met and how their research interests matched.