Tommaso Maccacaro

Tommaso Maccacaro (Pavia, 1951) graduated in Physics with honours in 1975 in Milan, in the group of Giuseppe Occhialini. His research activity began in the X-ray Astronomy group at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. He returned briefly to Italy, to the Institute of Radio Astronomy in Bologna, then part of the CNR, but in 1979 he moved to the USA, to the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where he collaborated with Riccardo Giacconi, 2002 Nobel laureate in Physics. In 1989 he returned to Italy, and since 1991 he has been Full Astronomer in Milan. His main interests are quasars, galaxy clusters, extragalactic surveys and the study of the X-ray background. The more than 250 papers he has published in these fields in international journals have long placed him among the most cited researchers in Space Sciences according to the independent agency ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). He is a member of the International Astronomical Union and of the American Astronomical Society.

In recent years he has combined his research activity with a growing interest and involvement in science outreach, and has held numerous research management and organisation roles, including the chair of the Time Allocation Committee of the Galileo National Telescope and, later, of the Observing Programmes Committee of ESO, the European Southern Observatory. He has been President of the Astronomy Working Group and member of the Space Science Advisory Committee of the European Space Agency, ESA. He was Director of the Brera Astronomical Observatory and, from December 2007 to August 2011, President of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics.

He edited La ricerca tradita (Garzanti, 2007), a collection of essays by several authors of Gruppo 2003, which had a significant impact on the ongoing debate in Italy on the state of scientific research.