Paolo Romano

Born in Catania (Italy) on July 13, 1974, he obtained a degree in Physics from the University of Catania on May 22, 1999, and a PhD in Physics on February 25, 2003. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Catania from August 1, 2003, to July 31, 2004. Since December 30, 2005, he has been a researcher at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF).

He was a member of the INAF Thematic Committee “Sun and Solar System” and responsible for the preliminary design of the instrument control system for the European Solar Telescope (EST).

He oversees the solar telescope at the INAF – Catania Astrophysical Observatory (INAF-OACT) and leads the INAF-OACT contribution to the Space Weather Service Network (SWESNET) of the European Space Agency (ESA). Additionally, he is a core team member of Metis/SOLO and a scientific team member of SOLAR-C (JAXA) and MUSE (NASA). He serves as the project scientist for the Interferometric BIdimensional Spectrometer 2.0 (IBIS2.0).

He previously led the INAF-OACT contribution to the Space Situational Awareness programme of ESA (contract No. 400113186/15/D/MRP) and has served as Principal Investigator (PI) for INAF-OACT in several funded national and international research projects, including the EU-FP7 projects EST, eHEROES, SOLID, and SOLARNET, as well as the H2020 projects PRE-EST and SOLARNET. He was also co-PI of two PRIN INAF projects.

His academic contributions include collaborating in the teaching of Solar Physics at the University of Catania and working on the development of the ICARUS archive (INAF Catania Astrophysics Research Utility for the Sun Archive), which is part of the SOlar ARchive NETwork (SOLARNET). He is in charge of the Office that promotes and supports outreach activities for INAF-OACT.

He has extensive experience in international coordinated observing campaigns and in the analysis of both ground-based and space-based data. He serves as a referee for several prestigious journals, including Solar Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Astrophysical Journal, Astrophysical Journal Letters, Astrophysical Journal Special Series, Advances in Astronomy, Annals of Geophysics, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, and AGU books.

He has supervised several PhD students and postdoctoral researchers and has published more than 100 refereed research articles, with an h-index of 25.