Rocco Lico

Rocco Lico

Postdoctoral Fellow
Istituto di Radioastronomia (IRA-INAF) & Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) ⋆ EHT scientist.

About me

Welcome to my (most likely not-very-up-to-date) webpage! This is not meant to be a formal (and boring) cv, but rather a collection of a few basic notes about my work.

I’m an astrophysicist, currently postdoctoral fellow at Istituto di Radioastronomia - Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (IRA-INAF) and Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC). In the past years I also got a postdoctoral fellowship at Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR, Bonn) and University of Bologna (UniBO), and I did part of my PhD research work at the Boston University (USA) (Marco Polo grant).

My research interests and scientific experience mainly focus on the physics of super massive black holes and their relativistic jets. I make use of the so-called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) technique, that consists in synchronizing multiple radio telescopes across the globe, and provides us with the highest angular resolution achievable from Earth. By pushing the VLBI tecqnique to the limit, at mm wavelengths, with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration we are now able to directly image the horizon-scale emission of super massive black holes (the so-called black hole shadow).

In the EHT collaboration I play several leading roles (webpage):

  • AGN science working group coordinator.
  • Co-lead of parameter survey and antenna gains teams.
  • Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Officer.
  • Management Team secretary.

I’m also member of the Next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (I’m one of the facilitators of the multi-wavelength science team of the “BHs and their cosmic context” working group), Global mm VLBI Array (GMVA), Radioastron space-VLBI, and East Asia to Italy nearly global VLBI scientific pojetcs.

Among other things, I’m a member of the Time Allocation Committee for the Italian radio telescopes), I’m principal investigator of several observing projects and co-supervised several student thesis and projects. For more info about my research please explore the other pages of this website, or take a look here, or just drop me a message [rlico@iaa.es].