New EGO director Massimo Carpinelli starts his mandate

Massimo Carpinelli, professor at the University of Milano Bicocca and research associate at INFN, officially began his mandate as the new director of EGO this month. He had already been appointed to the role in June 2022 by the EGO Council. Prof. Carpinelli succeeds Stavros Katsanevas, director since 2018 who sadly passed away prematurely in November 2022.

This month Carpinelli, a professor at the University of Milan Bicocca and a research associate at INFN, officially started his mandate. He had been appointed in June 2022 by the EGO Council, composed of representatives of the three scientific institutions that fund it: the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Dutch NWO-I, Netherlands Foundation of Scientific Research Institutes, represented by the Nikhef Laboratory. Prof. Carpinelli will succeed to Stavros Katsanevas, director of EGO since 2018 who sadly passed away prematurely in November 2022.

“With the recent nomination as EGO director of Massimo Carpinelli, we are deeply convinced that EGO is in very good hands for the future years to come and we are looking forward to work closely with the new director. There are many challenges to face for EGO : the start of the fourth data taking run in 2023, the preparation and installation of the second phase of the Virgo upgrade for the fifth run, and the important decisions to be taken for the future of EGO, connected of course with the future of Virgo and Einstein Telescope. We wish Massimo Carpinelli, EGO, and Virgo many important discoveries on gravitational wave physics in the near future.” said Vincent Poireau, scientific director at CNRS/IN2P3 and EGO council president.

“I thank the EGO Council and am honoured to be able to undertake this task at such a significant time for our community.” commented Massimo Carpinelli, “The next few years will be extremely interesting but also challenging: we expect considerable results from future data-taking cycles of our detectors, and the completion of the Advanced Virgo + upgrades awaits us. I will work to further strengthen the international dimension of EGO, a dimension inherent in the scientific enterprise of gravitational waves: from the visionary insight of Adalberto Giazotto and Alain Brillet, to the discovery of gravitational waves, to the Nobel Prize, and the real scientific revolution we are currently experiencing: the adventure has just begun” Carpinelli concludes.

“The Virgo experiment and the EGO Consortium are priority activities for INFN. They represent the present of new gravitational wave physics in Europe, and are the scientific foundations of the future Einstein Telescope – said Marco Pallavicini, INFN vice president and member of the EGO Council – We are delighted with the Council’s decision to appoint Massimo Carpinelli as the new Director of EGO for the three-year period 2023-2025. We wish Carpinelli well in his work, confident that the conditions for new future discoveries in O4, O5 and beyond will continue to be cultivated.”

Massimo Carpinelli graduated and obtained his Phd from the University of Pisa, where he was Associate Professor until 2006. He is currently Full Professor at the Department of Physics ‘G.Occhialini’ of the University of Milano Bicocca. He was Rector of the University of Sassari and member of the Council of the Conference of Italian University Rectors, President of the Scientific Commission dedicated to technological research and interdisciplinary applications of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. He participated in the particle physics experiments ALEPH at CERN in Geneva and BaBar at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

EGO, the European Gravitational Observatory was founded in 2000 by the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). NWO-I, Netherlands Foundation of Scientific Research Institutes, represented by the Nikhef Laboratory joined as an associate member in 2022. Its mission is to ensure the operation, maintenance and enhancement of the Virgo gravitational wave detector and to promote gravitational wave research in Europe.