Paolo Giommi

Paolo Giommi is a long-experienced scientist working at the Italian Space Agency. He is author or co-author of approximately 400 publications in refereed journals, with approximately 49,000 citations and an H index of 103 (data from Google scholar and ADS).

His professional career started in 1980 when, after graduating in Physics at the state university of Milan, Italy, he joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Cambridge, MA, USA) as an ESA research fellow. At CfA he worked mostly on X-ray data from the "Einstein Observatory" concentrating on studies of QSOs, BL Lacertae objects and X-ray surveys.
In 1982 he joined the European Space Agency (ESA)i as a member of the EXOSAT Observatory team at ESA-ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany where he worked for over four years as a Duty Scientist, deeply involved in the scientific operations of the EXOSAT satellite and in the construction of the EXOSAT results database, one of the first astronomical archives to become available on the Web. %In Darmstadt he continued his research in the field of extragalactic X-ray %astronomy and led the data analysis and follow up observations program of %the EXOSAT High Galactic Latitude Survey.
At the end of the EXOSAT orbital operations Paolo moved to ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, where he played a key role in the development of the EXOSAT on-line archive and in the construction of a number of multi-mission X-ray data analysis software packages, some of which still in use (e.g. XIMAGE, BROWSE).
In 1991 he joined the European Space Information System (ESIS) team, at ESA-ESRIN in Frascati, Italy as the ESIS Senior Scientist. In this period he collaborated with various international teams active in archival research, in particular with the NASA/HEASARC group.
In July 1995 he became a member of the BeppoSAX team as the manager of the BeppoSAX Science Data Center in Rome.
Between 2000 and 2016 he served as the director or the ASI Science Data Center, ASDC. Between 2007 and 2009 he also covered the position of italian Lead Scientist of the Simbol-X formation flying hard-X-ray mission.
Currently, he acts as the Senior Scientist of the ASI Space Science Data Center (SSDC) and is a senior member of the International Relations unit iof ASI, where he acts as the coordinator of the China-Italy Moon Mapping project and the team leader for the United Nations "Open Universe" initiative.

Paolo's scientific activities have been mostly focused in the area of extragalactic astrophysics since the beginning of his career, which started in the field of AGN surveys using data from the Einstein and EXOSAT X-ray astronomy satellites. A good fraction of his scientific efforts has been dedicated to multi-frequency multi-messenger studies of blazars, an activity that resulted in many highly cited publications, making Paolo one of the world's experts in the field. Other important topics in Paolo's scientific interests are Gamma-ray bursts and cosmology.
He is currently also an Adjunct Professor at the International Center for Relativistic Astrophyiscs Network (ICRANet), a member of the faculty of the International Relativistic Astrophysics (IRAP) PhD program, and a Hans Fisher senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Technical University of Munich.

Paolo was awarded the "Bruno Rossi Prize" four times, in 1998, 2007, 2011 and 2012 as a key player of the BeppoSAX, Swift, Fermi and AGILE teams.
His name is included in the 2014, 2015 and 2016 Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) list of top 1% Highly Cited researchers

Publications list (from ADS)
Refereed publications (from ADS)