A prestigious recognition to a Bicocca astrophysicist!

Dr. Elisa Bortolas has been awarded the Marie Curie Global Fellowship.

A bit of history

Elisa has been one of the best students I have encountered in Milano-Bicocca. I had the pleasure to supervise her during both her bachelor thesis (on the interpretation of megamaser observations) and her master, when her study on the dynamics of massive black hole (MBH) binaries in galactic (stellar) nuclei was published in an high-impact international journal.

Elisa left Milan for the PhD, done at the University of Padova and in close collaboration with the University of Surrey, where she broadened and deepened her comprehension of stars and MBHs in galactic nuclei. Her further achievements granted her a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, where she started working on cosmological simulations of galaxy formation, demonstrating that the common assumptions on the timescales for the formation of MBH binaries are often too simplistic due to the presence of non-axisymmetric features in galaxies.

Recently Elisa came back home, hired in a ERC funded group as senior post-doc. During these years, Elisa demonstrated to have grown into a brilliant independent researcher. As an example, Elisa opened an independent line of research tackling the problem of tidal disruption of stars by MBHs. In a few years Elisa has become a prominent and leading figure in the community working on the field, and has been awarded a Marie Curie Global Fellowship, that will bring her for a few years at Princeton!

Elisa is leaving her (academically speaking) home for the second time… We wish her an even brighter future career, and who knows, maybe we’ll see you here for a third time!