SPACE -
I worked on a number of subjects related to HERMES-Pathfinder, a constellation of nanosatellites to monitor cosmic explosions called gamma-ray bursts.
Breaking news: HERMES launched at 6:39UTC of 2025 March 15 from Vandenberg, California, on-board Space X Falcon 9 Transporter 13 --- yuhuu please god make it work!
Beside software and data, I used to spend a lot of my time in labs.
In 2019 I took part to an experimental campaign to qualify GAGG:Ce scintillators. Between 2022 and 2023 I worked at the calibration of the seven HERMES scientific payloads.
For this purpose, I wrote mescal, a software to tag each photon observed by a siswich detector with an energy measure.
During 2024 I also worked on LEM-X, a lunar high-energy observatory under study for the ASI Earth-Moon-Mars program, studying the impact of the mooning site on scientific operation, and writing an implementation of IROS tailored for this instrument.
Recently I got involved with LSST and am now working on a tool to cross-match alerts from space-borne instruments with those from this cool oncoming telescope.
ALGORITHMS -
With Kes Ward and others, I worked on an algorithm called Poisson-FOCuS.
It is a fast and powerful technique to detect anomalies in time series of counts, which can be used for discovering gamma-ray bursts.
In particular, I implemented an HERMES-specific version of Poisson-FOCuS and tested its performance on real and simulated data against other algorithms.
For this purpose I also wrote a software which simulates detectors, noise and gamma-ray burst called Synthburst.
Poisson-FOCuS is core to hbstools, a library I wrote to automatize the offline search for GRBs in HERMES data.
Welcome to my homepage and thanks for the visit!