I graduated with a Laurea degree in physics at the University of Milan, Italy, working on the early characterization of silicon pixel detectors for the ATLAS experiment at CERN. After a short period at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBNL) to wrap up what initiated in Milan, I moved to the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) for one year to contribute to the development of the silicon strip detector for the Fermi gamma-ray satellite (called GLAST back then). Having decided to continue my studies in the US, I completed my Ph.D. in physics in 2003 at Princeton University in Frank Calaprice’s group working on the Borexino solar neutrino experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory (LNGS) in Italy. Specifically, I was part of the team that built the thin nylon vessel containing the liquid scintillator and developed the first-ever radon filter for clean room air. I continued on Borexino at Princeton as a postdoc for one more year during which I helped commission some of the scintillator handling plants underground. I then moved to Giorgio Gratta’s group at Stanford University to join, in its early stages, the EXO-200 experiment searching for neutrino-less double beta decay of Xe-136, which operated at the WIPP underground repository in New Mexico until 2018. At Stanford, I led the final design and construction of the EXO-200 TPC.
I joined the faculty at the UMass Physics Department in 2009 with a research program comprising the search for neutrino-less double beta decay with EXO-200 and its successor, nEXO, the hunt for particle dark matter with DarkSide, of which UMass was a founding member, and a continued solar and terrestrial neutrino program with Borexino.