ERC meets MSCA: Michela Mapelli and Mario Pasquato

Astrophysics meets artificial intelligence: a stellar combination.

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

Michela has had a very successful career, working at several universities and research centres in Europe and receiving several prizes. Among them, in 2015 she received the MERAC Prize for the best early-career researcher in Theoretical Astrophysics from the European Astronomical Society. Most importantly, since 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 PhD in Physics from Pisa University in 2010 and then worked all over the world (USA, Korea, United Arab Emirates, and Italy). At a certain point in his career, he fell in love with machine learning and his latest research consists of applying machine learning techniques to cosmology, planetary astrophysics and particle astrophysics. This is also the main objective of his MSCA project “RISING” (Realistic and Informative Simulations with machine learnING), a Global Fellowship which takes him first to the University of Montreal for a two-year outgoing phase and then to Padua for one year.

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