Speakers

Giuseppina Micela

 Director of Research

INAF – Astronomical Observatory G.S .Vaiana  Palermo, Italy

Giuseppina Micela is director of  research at the INAF Astronomical Observatory of Palermo of which she was director from 2012 to 2018. She received her PhD in Physics from the University of Palermo and spent research periods at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Physics of the CNR and in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the University of Chicago.

To date she is the author of about 500 articles in international journals and her scientific interests have focused on the physics of young stars, the stellar contribution to the X-ray background, stellar coronas and more recently on the study of exoplanets.

She is involved in the use of the HARPS-N spectrograph installed at the Galileo National Telescope, and ESPRESSO at ESO's VLT which are today among the most sensitive instruments for planetary research and of which she is co-investigator.

She is one of the two responsible for the Italian contribution to the ESA Ariel mission which will be launched in 2029 to observe the atmospheres of a thousand exoplanets.

She has been a member of numerous international committees including several scientific committees for the use of space missions dedicated to the study of extrasolar planets and has been responsible for some astrophysics projects of the European Commission. She was national coordinator of the PREMIALE project, funded by MIUR, "A Way to Other Worlds-WOW". Finally, she is the author of the book “Birth and Death of the Stars” for the Il Mulino publishing house.

Alessandra Rotundi

Full Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Department of Science and Technology

University of Naples Parthenope, Naples (Italy)

Alessandra Rotundi is Full Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, at the Department of Science and Technology of the University of Naples "Parthenope", Italy. She graduated in Physics at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and obtained her PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Naples "Federico II".

· She coordinated the Italian team selected by NASA dedicated to the analysis of dust samples collected in the coma of comet Wild2 and brought back to Earth by the Stardust / NASA space probe (2006-2007).

Since 2010 she has been responsible for the GIADA instrument, which flew aboard the Rosetta space probe of the European Space Agency, for the characterization of the dust coma of comet 67PC-G.

· In 2017 she was invited by the University of Paris-Sud as "Professeur Invités".

· In the framework of the Comet Interceptor space mission of the European Space Agency (launch scheduled for 2029), she was the national responsible for the mission (2019-2022) and is the Deputy-PI of the DISC instrument, part of the on-board payload, which will characterize the physical properties of dust from a dynamically new comet or interstellar object.

Curiosity: in 2017 the "Corriere della Sera" included her among the 50 women in the world who distinguished themselves for the professional results obtained, http://www.corriere.it/eventi-2017/donne-del-2017/index .shtml#0.

Congress/Conferences

40 Public/Educational Invited Conferences.

33 International Congresses Invited Oral Presentations.

14 International Congresses Invited to be part of the Scientific Organising Committee/Session Convener.

5 International Congresses/Workshops as part of the Organising Committee.

7 International Congresses/Workshops as Session Convener.

Referee for the following International Journals:

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Meteoritic & Planetary Science, Planetary and Space Science, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Atmospheric Measurements Techniques Discussion, Icarus, Astrophysical Journal Lett, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. 

Publications

· 150 papers on referred international journals.

· 198 non-referred international publications.

· 6 Public Outreach papers (1 in French, 5 in Italian).

A. Marco Saitta

Full Professor

Director of IMPMC, Sorbonne, Paris (France)

A. Marco Saitta is Professor of Exceptional Class 2 in Physics at the Sorbonne Université. He received his PhD in Theory of Condensed Matter at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste in 1997 and then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Chemistry Department of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 2000 he was appointed Maître de Conférences at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, now merged into Sorbonne Université, at the Institut de Minéralogie, de Physique des Matériaux et de Cosmochimie (IMPMC), where he became professor in 2011. Since 2021 he is director of the IMPMC (about 120 permanent staff), director of the French national network Groupement de Recherche "Intelligence Artificielle en sciences des MATériaux (IAMAT)" (more than 500 researchers) and PI of the Sorbonne University consortium "MAESTRO ( Materials for Energy)". A specialist in the theory of electronic structure and ab initio calculations, his research activity has ranged from bulk semiconductors to graphene and nanotubes, up to water and ice; His main interests are the exotic properties of molecular crystals, liquids and amorphous under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature, for which he received the 2006 Young Scientist Award from the European High Pressure Research Group. In recent years his research has opened up to more interdisciplinary fields, such as earth sciences and biogeochemistry, with particular attention to machine learning methods in materials science. He is the author of over 115 papers, including 1 Nature, 2 Nature Materials, 1 Nature Communications, 8 PNAS and 19 Phys. Rev. Lit. He has about 5400 citations, an h-index = 40 (WoS). He has received more than 40 invitations to international conferences.

Raffaele Saladino

Full Professor of Organic Chemistry

Department of Ecological and Biological Sciences

University of Tuscia, Viterbo (Italy)

Career and academic qualifications:

1992 PhD Organic Chemistry @University La Sapienza, Rome (IT).

1994-1996 Visiting Scientist University of Montréal (Quebec, Canada).

1994-2000 Assistant Professor UNITUS, Viterbo (IT).

2000-2016 Associate Professor UNITUS.

2001-2006 Vice-Director Agrobiology and Chemistry Department ABAC, UNITUS.

2007-2012 Director of ABAC, UNITUS.

2014-2017 President Evaluation Nucleus (NdV) UNITUS.

2017-2023 CEO of UNITUS.

2018-2023 President of the Italian Society of Astrobiology SIA.  

2019-2023 President of the Italian Astrobiology Institute IAI.

2020-2023 Vice-Director DEB, UNITUS.

Raffaele Saladino's research interests concern organic synthesis, prebiotic organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry and green chemistry. Since 2000, Raffaele Saladino's research activity in the field of prebiotic chemistry has been focused on the development of new synthetic models for the formation and molecular evolution of molecules of biological relevance for the Origin of Life. These studies have highlighted the catalytic role played by minerals and metal oxides in various prebiotic transformations under thermal, photochemical and high-energy particle irradiation conditions. Raffaele Saladino has published more than 230 articles in international journals.