I’m extremely pleased to have been nominated member of the new Executive Committee of our PhD School (Comitato Esecutivo del Corso di Dottorato). The other members of the committee will be Raffaello Potestio (coordinator of the PhD school and chair of the committee), Gabriele Ferrari (deputy coordinator of the PhD school), Matteo Calandra, Lorenzo Pavesi, Leonardo Ricci, and Emanuele Scifoni. Our tasks will include guiding and overseeing a smooth running of the PhD school, while also making related decisions at important times, and obviously helping an otherwise overburdened Raffaello as coordinator. Undoubtedly a very important responsability, given we are talking about the programme which produces our PhD graduates. I look forward to working with my fellow committee members over the next years!
Teaching committee
I’m extremely pleased to have been nominated member of the new Teaching Committee (Commissione Didattica) - “new” given that we just elected the new Head of Department, and this implies a reshuffling/re-election of all committees, councils, and boards. The other members of the committee will be Albino Perego (teaching coordinator and chair of the committee), Stefano Azzini, Roberto Iuppa, Matteo Leonardi, and Marco Zanatta. Our tasks will include taking care of all things teaching-related, and in particular I will be responsible for the theoretical courses at both BSc and MSc levels. It will undoubtedly involve a lot of work, but I am very happy to put myself on the line to help improve our teaching activities, for which we are among the best Italian Universities. I look forward to working with my fellow committee members over the next years!
PhD defense of Tiziano Schiavone
Today I had the pleasure of serving as external committee member for the PhD thesis discussion of Tiziano Schiavone, a PhD student at the University of Pisa supervised by Giovanni Marozzi, Giovanni Montani, and Giuseppe Fanizza. Tiziano wrote an excellent thesis by the title of “Large-scale structure of the Universe in General Relativity and beyond”, which on the one hand studied the impact of local inhomogeneities on cosmological observables, and on the other hand examined ways to distinguish between ΛCDM and competing cosmological models, particularly those based on modifications to gravity, especially in light of cosmological tensions. The other two committee members were my collaborator Eleonora Di Valentino and Scilla Degl’Innocenti. Unfortunately I could not be present in person for the first ever PhD defense of which I am committe member (I would have loved to visit the beautiful city of Pisa after many years). Tiziano’s defense was excellent (the final mark we gave was “ottimo”, which roughly translates to something between “very good” and “excellent”), and he will now be moving to the University of Lisbon as a Della Riccia fellow for his first postdoc - congratulations Tiziano!