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 and staff scientist at Istituto di Radioastronomia - Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (IRA-INAF). Over the past years, I’ve also worked at Instituto de AstrofĂsica de AndalucĂa (IAA-CSIC, Spain), Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR, Germany), and University of Bologna (UniBO, Italy), and I conducted part of my PhD research at Boston University (USA).
My research interests and scientific experience are primarily focused on the physics of supermassive black holes and their relativistic plasma jets. I use very long baseline interferometry (VLBI)—a technique that synchronizes multiple radio telescopes across the globe—to achieve the highest angular resolution attainable from Earth. By pushing VLBI to its limits at millimeter wavelengths, with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration we are now able to directly image the horizon-scale emission of super massive black holes—what’s often referred to as the black hole shadow.
As part of the EHT collaboration, I had the privilege of contributing to the first-ever horizon-scale image of the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. For this work, I co-led both the parameter survey and antenna gains teams, and for my contribution I received one of the (2022 EHT early-career awards).
I’m also an active member of other scientific collaborations, including the Next-generation Event Horizon Telescope, Einstein Telescope, Radioastron space-VLBI, and East Asia to Italy nearly global VLBI, among others. I serve on the Time Allocation Committee for the Italian radio telescopes), lead several observing projects as Principal Investigator, and have co-supervised multiple student theses and research projects.
For more information about my research, feel free to explore the other pages of this website, check out this link, or just drop me a message at [rocco.lico@inaf.it].