Sergio Colafrancesco

Stay at the IAC: 26/06/2015 to 11/07/2015.

Research line: Cosmology and Astroparticles

Currently Prof. Colafrancesco is Full Professor in radio astronomy and DST/NRF SKA Research Chair in the Wits School of Physics, University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg – South Africa).

Before joining Wits, he was a Professor in Astrophysics at the University of Rome and a senior scientist with the Italian Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). He obtained his Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Padua, Italy.

Prof. Colafrancesco is member of the CTA Consortium and representative of the South African participation to CTA, member of the South Africa SKA Team and MeerKAT Team and member of the RADIOASTRON International Scientific Committee (RISC), among other scientific committees. The current main research strategy of Prof. Colafrancesco is to use radio astronomical observations with the most powerful radio telescopes (SKA, and its precursor MeerKAT in South Africa) and their correlation with the largest gamma-ray telescopes in Southern Africa (HESS in Namibia and the future Cherenkov Telescope Array - CTA) to unveil the structure, origin and evolution of the Universe and of its sub-structures, from the smallest galaxies to the largest galaxy clusters.

In this context, Prof Colafrancesco has a wide range of research interests, among which the search for the nature of dark matter, the origin of dark energy, probes of gravity on cosmological scales, the origin of cosmic magnetism, the multi-scale evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters, the nature of the most powerful objects in the Universe (blazars and radio-galaxies), the origin of high-energy phenomena and magnetic fields in cosmic structures, the origin of cosmic rays and the nature of the highest-E particle events in the Universe. He is also currently exploring new directions in the astrophysical studies of light propagation and quantum space-time effect."