After graduating in Physics in 2017, I pursued a doctorate in Physics at the University of Palermo (Italy) and at the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), in a cotutelle agreement with the University of Tübingen (Germany). I successfully defended my PhD thesis in March 2021 and I moved to France to start my first postdoctoral research at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP), in Toulouse. There, I was a member of the XMM-Newton Science Survey Center, in charge of performing weekly screenings of new observations and contributing to the making of the latest 4XMM Source Catalogues. I also started researching on Ultraluminous X-ray Sources (ULXs), using data from several X-ray missions.
In 2023, I moved to Rome to join the High Energy Astrophysics Group at the Osservatorio Astronomico of Rome (INAF-OAR). In this second postdoctoral position, I am focusing almost exclusively on ULXs, especially on those showing pulsations and hence hosting a neutron star.
Curious about my work? Check out my interview with Media INAF.
Research interests
- Accretion onto compact objects
- Ultraluminous and Hyperluminous X-ray sources (ULXs and HLXs)
- High-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs)
- Low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) and X-ray pulsars
- Artificial Intelligence applied to astrophysics
- Data mining
- Non X-ray background for imaging X-ray satellites
Dr. Roberta Amato 