BERSANELLI, Marco

Marco BersanelliMarco Bersanelli is Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Director of the Ph.D. School in Physics, Astrophysics and Applied Physics at the University of Milan, Italy. His main field of research is cosmology, in particular observations of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the early universe. After graduating from the University of Milan (1986) he worked as a Visiting Scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, with Professor George Smoot, and then at Istituto di Fisica Cosmica, CNR, Milan. He worked on several experiments on the cosmic microwave background, including two expeditions to the Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole. In 1991 he received the National Science Foundation Medal in recognition of his work in Antactica. Since 1992 he has been playing a leading role in the PLANCK space mission, the European Space Agency satellite dedicated to cosmology, successfully launched on May 14th 2009 from Kourou, French Guiana. He is the Instrument Scientist of one of the two instruments onboard the PLANCK satellite and has been a member of the PLANCK Science Team since its formation in 1995. He is author of more than two-hundred scientific papers as well as of several interdisciplinary essays and popular articles.

Professor Bersanelli is President of EURESIS, a cultural association promoting interdisciplinary dialogue on frontier topics in science. He has given many public seminars, coordinated over 12 scientific exhibitions visited by tens of thousands of people and published essays exploring the links between science and the wider horizons of human knowledge and religious experience. He is author of the recently published From Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of All Time: In Their Own Words by Templeton Press, about the human adventure of scientific research.