Today we have the pleasure of hosting Carsten van de Bruck, visiting us from Sheffield! Carsten is currently a Professor at the University of Sheffield, and is a recognized expert on theoretical cosmology, particularly for what concerns modified gravity models for inflation and dark energy, and their observational tests. He will not be delivering a talk, but is here as one of the external opponents for Chiara Cecchini’s PhD defense (which, by the way, was outstanding - you can find her PhD thesis on scale-invariant inflationary models here). Welcome Carsten!
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!