Curriculum Vitae

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Research profile

I am a theoretical physicist with over eight years of research experience spanning high-energy physics and general relativity. My work focuses on the analytical description of gravitational binary systems and their waveforms, combining particle-physics tools – such as scattering amplitudes – with post-Newtonian and gravitational self-force methods. During my PhD, I developed a direct link between on-shell scattering amplitudes and gravitational waveforms. Since then, I have developed methods for translating results between scattering and bound Kerr orbits, including their gravitational waveforms, as well as a new effective field theory formulation of gravitational self-force for bound orbits. Overall, my research has involved international collaborations with more than thirty researchers across Europe, North America and Asia.

In 2026, I was awarded the prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship for my project High-precision effective field theory for extreme-mass-ratio inspirals. I am now building a research group at Southampton, with PhD students and postdocs working on these questions. My long-term vision is to build a unified framework that connects weak-field Post-Minkowskian and post-Newtonian theory with strong-field methods from the self-force approach, leading to improved waveform models for current (LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA) and future (LISA, ET and CE) gravitational-wave detectors.

Academic appointments

• 2026–ongoing — Royal Society University Research Fellow, University of Southampton, Southampton.
• 2025–2026 — Postdoctoral Research Associate, Queen Mary University of London, London.
• 2022–2025 — Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.

Fellowships and research funding

• 2026 — Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Major eight-year fellowship; total programme value approximately £1.8 million. Host: University of Southampton. Project: High-precision effective field theory for extreme-mass-ratio inspirals.
• 2019 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN fellowship, SAGEX. European Union Horizon 2020 fellowship, providing approximately £100k of personal fellowship support and advanced research and professional training over three years.
• 2023–2026 — £140k in competitive funding for international programmes and workshops: GGI six-week programme (£83.7k); ICTP-SAIFR two-week programme (£25k); Nordita two-week programme (£20.6k); and Higgs Centre workshop (£10.4k). I was main coordinator of the GGI and Nordita programmes and the Higgs Centre workshop, and co-organiser of the ICTP-SAIFR programme.

Education

2018–2022	PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics, Trinity College Dublin. Supervisor: Prof. Ruth Britto. Thesis: Coherent states and classical radiative observables in the S-matrix formalism. During my PhD, I won a competitive Marie-Curie International Training Network fellowship, Scattering Amplitudes: from Geometry to Experiments (SAGEX). The fellowship gave me research training through dedicated workshops and schools and a three-month internship at Wolfram Research, as well as training in scientific writing, presentation skills, STEM outreach, grant writing, time and project management, career development and good scientific practice.
2015–2017	MSc in Theoretical Physics, University of Padova, 110/110 cum laude. Erasmus+ exchange at the University of Göttingen for the MSc thesis The infinite-spin representations of the Poincaré group, supervised by Prof. K.-H. Rehren. Final GPA: 29.5/30, with five extra exams (34 ECTS) beyond the degree requirements.
2012–2015	BSc in Physics, University of Padova, 110/110 cum laude. Final GPA: 29.6/30, with one extra exam (6 ECTS) beyond the degree requirements.

Publications and research impact

You can find my research papers, together with journal and arXiv links, on the publications page.

Explore my publications

International programmes and workshops

I am excited about new applications of particle-physics tools to gravity, and I believe that people from different communities will need to work together to solve the binary problem. To work towards this, I helped start a series of meetings bringing together researchers working on scattering amplitudes, gravitational self-force and related approaches to binary dynamics.

Programmes and workshops

Supervision and mentoring

• 2024–ongoing — PhD co-supervisor: Emanuele Rosi, Sapienza University of Rome. Co-supervision with Prof. Vittorio Del Duca. I proposed the initial project on ultra-relativistic scattering in gravity using scattering amplitudes. We meet weekly, and the collaboration has already led to two joint papers.
• 2024 — MSc co-supervisor: Andrea de Simone, Sapienza University of Rome. Six-month thesis on gravitational scattering amplitudes and the two-body problem.
• 2024 — MSc co-supervisor: Damiano Barcaro, Sapienza University of Rome. Six-month thesis: Scattering waveforms for Kerr black holes from the soft expansion arXiv; subsequently began a PhD at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
• 2022 — MSc supervisor: Leixi Wang, University of Edinburgh. Four-month thesis, Classical spacetimes from amplitudes; I proposed the project and supervised it to the end.

Invited presentations

I have had the good fortune to visit many wonderful places around the world to present my work. The complete record, including contributed talks and discussion sessions, is available on the talks page.

Teaching, service and memberships

My teaching and tutoring spans high-school, Master’s and PhD levels, primarily in English. The full record is available on the teaching page.

I have served as a journal referee since 2022 for Journal of High Energy Physics, Physical Review D, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics and SciPost Physics. I am a core member of the LISA Consortium and the Einstein Telescope Collaboration.

Press and outreach

• In 2022, I was interviewed by Charlie Wood for the Quanta Magazine article Massive Black Holes Shown to Act Like Quantum Particles, which discussed my work on coherent graviton states and the emergence of classical radiation from quantum scattering.
• Nordita featured our 2026 programme in Bringing together communities to improve precision in gravitational-wave modeling, looking at why we brought these different research communities together and at the experience of the students and early-career researchers who took part.
• For the SAGEX film Doing a PhD in Physics, I contributed personal footage to a short film about the experience and challenges of doctoral research in physics.
• I created material for the Feynman-diagram section of the SAGEX online exhibition At the Frontiers of Physics, designed to introduce modern particle physics to a wider audience.
• I have also taken part in Pint of Science events in Padova, Edinburgh and London, discussing fundamental physics with general audiences.