What now seems to be a very long time ago, I used to be an astrophysicist – or the embryo-version of it, i.e. an astrophysics grad student: I graduated in astronomy at the University of Bologna, Italy, and later got a PhD from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Then I realised that the most fun I'd had was actually getting to write the dissertation, so I became a science writer. I wonder what will come next...
From early on in my studies I've been keen on cosmology – the study of the Universe as a whole. So no wonder that the focus of my research has been – guess what? – cosmology. The main point of my PhD thesis was to come up with methods to analyse cosmological observations in what is called a "model-independent" way. If you want to understand what this means or are interested in reading more about it, have a look at this page – you will find a brief overview of all that happened back then: my research life, goals and results, as well as links to papers and presentations.
Some time ago I wrote a guest post for the collective blog The trenches of discovery, which covers a variety of topics ranging from cosmology to biochemistry, from general science to art theory and practice - it's a really neat blog and you should check it out, by the way.
My contribution was a brief recollection of my 'change of heart' (ie. moving from research in cosmology to science writing) plus some -hopefully insightful- thoughts about the process of science communication and public outreach. You can read it here: