The Team

THE BOLOGNA TEAM: (from left to right) Michele Bellazzini (INAF), Livia Origlia (INAF), Alessio Mucciarelli (UniBO), Emanuele Dalessandro (UniBO), Francesco Ferraro (UniBO), Barbara Lanzoni (UniBO)

THE  PI  SHORT  HISTORY: Francesco R. Ferraro was first intrigued by Astronomy as a child. He was born in 1961 in a small town (Corsano, near Lecce) on the beautiful sea of Puglia, but he mostly grew up in Matera, a small city in south of Italy, in the so-called ``Magna Grecia'' area, a region full of ancient history of the Greek colonization. Naturally his initial main interest was Archeology. While he was collaborating with an amateur Archeologist group, there was an amateur astronomy group working next door to the Archeologists. The curiosity which led him to look in at next door's meetings was fatal: after many years of freezing nights spent following luminosity variability of nearby variable stars, he started to study Astronomy at the Bologna University where he earned a PhD degree in Astronomy.

After a Post-Doc in Germany (at the European Southern Observatory) he was researcher at the Bologna Observatory and he is now full professor at the Astronomy Department of the Bologna University. Since 2006 he is Presidente di Corso di Laurea (Chair of the teaching activity) for the  degree  in Astronomy and the Specialistic degree in Astrophysics and Cosmology.

His astronomical work is based on observations made with telescope on the Earth (mainly European Telescopes in Chile) and in space (Hubble Space Telescope). He is author of more than 300 scientific papers (more than 160 in refereed international journals).

Ferraro's principal field of investigation is the study of stellar evolution and stellar population in old stellar systems. Thus at the end he has finally succeeded in reconciling both his passions, indulging in an Astro-Archeology approach to the problem of the formation and the evolution of our Galaxy, via the systematic study of the oldest known fossils of that remote epoch: the Galactic Globular Clusters. Since his initial hobby became his vocation, he has turned his interest toward figurative art and currently enjoys painting.

THE TEAM LEADER: Francesco Ferraro

The team is composed of Francesco Ferraro, Emanuele Dalessandro, Alessio Mucciarelli and Barbara Lanzoni (Department of Astronomy, University of Bologna, Italy), Giacomo Beccari (ESA, Space Science Department, Noordwijk, Netherlands), Mike Rich (Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA), Livia Origlia, Michele Bellazzini and Gabriele Cocozza (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, Italy), Robert T. Rood (Astronomy Department, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA), Elena Valenti (ESO and Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Departamento de Astronomia, Santiago, Chile) and Scott Ransom (National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, USA).