Between 2014 and 2018 I was a PhD student in the General Relativity group at DAMTP, University of Cambridge, where I graduated with the thesis Causality and the initial value problem in Modified Gravity, under the supervision of Prof. Harvey Reall.
Before that, I read the Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, where I focused on mathematical physics and wrote, as part of the course, an essay on Black hole interiors.
I began my undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of Genova (Italy), where I completed the first year with full marks before transferring to King’s College London, where I finished my BSc in Mathematics & Physics and received several awards for my performance.
Einstein’s theory of General Relativity provides a simple, elegant and accurate description of the large scale structure of our Universe. Despite its many successes, this theory does not provide satisfactory theoretical explanations for certain phenomena (e.g. dark energy, singularities…). Many Modified Gravity theories have been proposed in order to account for these problems. While the physical implications of such models have received much attention, the study of their mathematical consistency has been neglected.
In my PhD research I studied the mathematical properties of two classes of Modified Gravity theories, namely Lovelock and Horndeski theories. The main objective was to determine whether they satisfy some fundamental consistency requirements such as causality and well-posedness of the initial value problem.
Our results suggest that these theories may not admit a well-posed initial value problem, implying that they may not constitute a viable alternative to Einstein’s theory.
You can see more details regarding my publications on my Google Scholar, INSPIRE or arXiv profiles.
On the initial value problem in Lovelock and Horndeski theories of gravity
HECAP Seminar, ICTP Trieste, 2018
On the well-posedness of Lovelock and Horndeski theories of gravity
DAMTP GR Seminar, University of Cambridge, 2017
Causality and hyperbolicity in Lovelock gravity
Gravitational Physics Seminar, University of Cardiff, 2016
Causality in Lovelock theories of gravity
DPMMS Junior Geometry Seminar, University of Cambridge, 2016
Graviton time delay in Lovelock gravity
DAMTP GR Seminar, University of Cambridge, 2015
I taught example classes for the following Part III (master’s level) courses at Cambridge:
After finishing my PhD, I had the fortune of being invited by my friend and colleague, Jack Williams, to join him on a trip to India to give lectures about maths-related topics to (mostly) high school students. We covered topics such as non-Euclidean geometry, cryptography, probability and basic machine learning. You can find some of the lecture notes here.