We’re really happy to welcome Simony Santos da Costa as the second postdoc in our group! Simony will be here for the next two years on a prestigious Caritro Fellowship, and will be working with myself and Max Rinaldi on tests of inflation and dark sector physics through the latest cosmological data, while also developing an ambitious outreach program at MUSE. Simony was last a postdoc at INFN Pisa, where she held one of the prestigious INFN theory fellowships for foreigners (or Italians who have been abroad for long enough). Fun fact: Simony will be sharing an office with Marco Calzà, and they both speak Portuguese (and Italian)! Welcome to our group Simony, and I’m really looking forward to working on many exciting projects together!
We got the Caritro Fellowship!
We (Max Rinaldi and I) received amazing news during the European Researchers’ Night - our application for the 2023 Caritro Postdoctoral Fellowship was successful, and our project was among the 9 selected in the whole of Trentino, across all fields! We were awarded 70.000€, and I’m super glad to announce that Simony Santos da Costa, currently a postdoc at INFN Pisa and whose application we supported as PIs, will therefore be joining our group in the coming months, for 2 years. The project we developed with Simony is entitled “Inflation and dark sector physics in light of next-generation cosmological surveys”, and consists of two parts: the scientific part is obviously targeting inflation, dark matter, and dark energy (especially in light of cosmological tensions and next-generation CMB and LSS data), whereas a second outreach part envisages a series of public lectures by Simony (who speaks Italian excellently!) at MUSE. One of the aims of the outreach part is of course to get the general public interested in science, but at the same time to raise awareness about the issue of gender (im)balance in physics, and hopefully encourage more young female students who are interested in physics to not be afraid to pursue their interests - in other words, we want Simony to be a role model for young women in physics at least in the Trentino region (let’s start small and see how things go). I’m really delighted at the prospect of having the first postdoc joining my group (though I’ll admit that, having been a postdoc myself until less than an year ago, it does feel somewhat strange), and I look forward to working with Simony, whose work I’ve been following for some time now!
Notte della Ricerca 2023
I had great fun taking part in the Notte della Ricerca (European Researchers’ Night - an Europe-wide public outreach event, meant to explain science and its impact to the public in fun and inspiring ways) at MUSE, the Science Museum of Trento. Together with Max Rinaldi and Chiara Cecchini (Max’s PhD student) we prepared four very simple posters, each related to one of our research themes: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Black Holes, and the CMB. No words, just pictures, the idea being that of getting people curious and encouraging them to come and talk to us about our work. It definitely worked, and we got tons of people of all ages and backgrounds asking us all sorts of questions, many of which related to white holes (somewhat unsurprisingly I would say). Despite my throat being very sore from all the talking, it was a truly fun night, and I hope we inspired some of the younger minds to come and study physics!
