About these pages

I wish to thank Caterina Visco for introducing me to GitHub and Jonathan McGlone for providing an excellent step-by-step guide on starting up with GitHub Pages and Jekyll. And since the vast majority of the design of these pages is 'borrowed' from Jonathan, I'll also borrow his credits list. This site is:

• Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
• Marked up with W3C validated HTML5
• WCAG 2.0 compliant
• Responsive and compatible with a variety of devices
• Using typefaces Merriweather by Eben Sorkin and Montserrat by Julieta Ulanovsky, and Font Awesome
• Powered by Jekyll
• Hosted on GitHub thanks to GitHub Pages
• Built using Bootstrap
• Something you can borrow freely to make your own.

About me

I graduated in Physics at the University of Naples Federico II in 1998 and moved on to obtain a Ph.D. in 2002 in Oncology/Physics from University College London, jointly with the Gray Cancer Institute, now part of Oxford University, but an independent institution at the time, in Northwood, Middlesex. At the 'Gray Lab', as it was known informally, I worked in the Cell and Molecular Biophysics Group directed by Professor Barry D. Michael, under the guidance of Dr Kevin M. Prise. My Ph.D. thesis subject was the characterization and the quantification of DNA double strand breaks induced by ionizing radiation of varying quality. This was jointly supervised by Kevin Prise and Professor John Hartley from University College London.

After a brief return to hometown Naples, I moved overseas again in the summer of 2003 and worked on my first post-doctoral research fellowship in the Radiation Research division of the Radiology Department at the New Jersey Medical School, directed by Professor Roger W. Howell, now merged into Rutgers University. By this time, I had made my first move toward the radiobiology of low doses of ionizing radiation, and my main interest was in the bystander effect and its interplay with the adaptive response. Together with Prof. Roger Howell, Prof. Edouard Azzam also kept a close eye on me. By autumn 2006, I was back to Italy for my second post-doc, in the Radiation Biophysics Group at Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, directed by Dr. Mauro Belli. Here I worked again on the radiation-induced adaptive response at ultra-low dose-rates of ionizing radiation.

In the spring of 2010 I obtained a permanent research position at the Italian National Institute of Ionizing Radiation Metrology, ENEA-INMRI. I now work in the Dosimetry division, formerly directed by Dr. Maria Pia Toni, where I am responsible for the primary Standards of air kerma, some standards of absorbed dose to water, and for the calibration and intercomparison services in the domain of radiation proection and radiation diagnostics dosimetry. Over the past few years, I was first trained on free air chambers and the primary measurements of air kerma that can be obtained usin them. Gradually I moved on to Monte Carlo techniques, using the particle transport code penelope from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. More recently, from 2014, I began working on calorimeters to obtain primary measurements of another physical quantity of relevance in radiation dosimetry, namely the absorbed dose to water, D_w. This requires a bunch of skills, including computer programming to talk to the electronics attached to the calorimeter, which at ENEA-INMRI we do with Microsoft Visual Studio.

I am the Italian national contact person for EURAMET's Technical Committee on Ionizing Radiation and vice-chair of the Comité Consultatif des Rayonnements Ionisants, section I (X- and gamma rays, charged particles) of the Meter Convention.