The Team
The team is composed by 14 astronomers. Most of them are Italian: beside Francesco Ferraro who coordinated the activity, there are Barbara Lanzoni, Emanuele Dalessandro, Mario Pasquato, Paolo Miocchi, Rodrigo Contreras, Nicoletta Sanna and Alessio Mucciarelli, all of them affiliated to the Physics and Astronomy Department (DIFA) of the Bologna University and member of the Cosmic-Lab project. Moreover, Giacomo Beccari of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), who also grew in the Bologna University, Michela Mapelli (INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Padova) and Enrico Vesperini currently working in the US, at the Department of Astronomy, Indiana University. Other foreign collaborators are Alison Sills (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada), Robert T. Rood (Virginia University, Charlottesville, USA) and Steinn Sigurdsson (Pennsylvania State University, USA).
THE PI SHORT HISTORY: Francesco R. Ferraro was first intrigued by Astronomy as a child. He was born in 1961 in a small town (Corsano, near Lecce) on the beautiful sea of Puglia, but he mostly grew up in Matera, a small city in south of Italy, in the so-called "Magna Grecia'' area, a region full of ancient history of the Greek colonization. Naturally his initial main interest was Archeology. While he was collaborating with an amateur Archeologist group, there was an amateur astronomy group working next door to the Archeologists. The curiosity which led him to look in at next door's meetings was fatal: after many years of freezing nights spent following luminosity variability of nearby variable stars, he started to study Astronomy at the Bologna University where he earned a PhD degree in Astronomy.
After a Post-Doc in Germany (at the European Southern Observatory) he was researcher at the Bologna Observatory and he is now full professor at the Physics and Astronomy Department of the Bologna University. From 2006 to 2012 he was Chair of the Professor board (Presidente di Corso di Laurea) for the first-level degree in Astronomy and the second-level degree in Astrophysics and Cosmology.
His astronomical work is based on observations made with telescope on the Earth (mainly European Telescopes in Chile) and in space (Hubble Space Telescope). He is author of more than 350 scientific papers (more than 180 in refereed international journals).
Ferraro's principal field of investigation is the study of stellar evolution and stellar populations in old stellar systems. Thus at the end he has finally succeeded in reconciling both his passions, indulging in an Astro-Archeology approach to the problem of the formation and the evolution of our Galaxy, via the systematic study of the oldest known fossils of that remote epoch: the Galactic Globular Clusters. Since his initial hobby became his vocation, he has turned his interest toward figurative art and currently enjoys painting.
The team leader: Francesco Ferraro
PART OF THE TEAM: (from the left) Barbara Lanzoni, Rodrigo Contreras Ramos, Francesco Ferraro, Emanuele Dalessandro, Giacomo Beccari, Alessio Mucciarelli, Nicoletta Sanna