Welcome to my homepage!

I am a post-doc at the IAP, working with Dr. Marta Volonteri and Prof. Joseph Silk.

My research mainly focuses on to massive black holes (MBHs): their formation and evolution within galactic nuclei, their dynamical evolution during galaxy mergers, leading to the formation of MBH binaries, and also tidal disruption events. I'm also interested in galaxy formation and evolution and in the effect of dwarf galaxies on the reionization.

During my Ph.D. thesis I studied MBH dynamics during the final stages of galaxy mergers, where two MBHs, each surrounded by a circum-nuclear disc, are supposed to merge, and the formation of MBH seeds via phases of super-critical accretion on to stellar mass BHs, by means of hydrodynamical simulations
(you can find the thesis manuscript here).

I typically use three different codes: the SPH code Gadget2 (Springel 2005), the AMR code RAMSES (Teyssier 2002) and the new meshfree lagrangian code GIZMO (Hopkins 2015).

My collaborators are:
Dr. Massimo Dotti (University of Milano Bicocca), Prof. Monica Colpi (University of Milano Bicocca), Prof. Francesco Haardt (University of Insubria), Davide Fiacconi (University of Zurich), Valentina Tamburello (University of Zurich), Prof. Lucio Mayer (University of Zurich), Prof. Piero Madau (UCSC), Dr. Michele Fumagalli (Durham University) and Deborah Mainetti (University of Milano Bicocca)