Paolo Giommi is a senior astrophysicist, author of about 330 refereed papers with a total of more than 17,800 citations and an h index of 61 (data from ADS). Currently he works at the Italian Space Agency (ASI) where he acts as the director of the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC), a world-class space data facility supporting several astrophysics, cosmology, space exploration and astro-particle space missions.
Paolo obtained his Italian degree of Laurea in Physics at the University of Milan
in 1980. His professional career started at the end of 1980 when he moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics (Cambridge, MA, USA) as an ESA research fellow.
At CfA he worked mostly on X-ray data from the "Einstein Observatory"
concentrating on studies of QSOs, BL Lacertae objects and X-ray surveys.
In 1982 he joined the EXOSAT Observatory team at the ESA establishment of
ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany where he worked for over four years as a Duty Scientist,
deeply involved in the scientific operations of the EXOSAT satellite and in
the construction of the EXOSAT results database, one of the first astronomical
archives to become available on the Web.
In Darmstadt he continued his research in the field of extragalactic X-ray
astronomy and led the data analysis and follow up observations program of
the EXOSAT High Galactic Latitude Survey.
At the end of the EXOSAT orbital operations Paolo moved to ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk,
where he played a key role in the development of the EXOSAT on-line archive
and in the construction of a number of multi-mission X-ray data analysis
software packages, some of which still in use (e.g. XIMAGE, BROWSE).
In 1991 he joined the European Space Information System (ESIS) team, at ESA-ESRIN
in Frascati, Italy as the ESIS Senior Scientist. In this period he collaborated
with various international teams active in archival research, in particular with
the NASA/HEASARC group.
In July 1995 he became a member of the BeppoSAX team as the manager of the BeppoSAX Science Data Center
in Rome.
Since the year 2000 he is the managing director of the the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC)
In the past years he also acted as the italian Lead Scientist of the Simbol-X hard-X-ray mission.
Currently he is also a senior member of the "Esploration and observation of the Universe" unit of the Italian Space Agency.
Paolo's scientific activities have been focused in the area of extragalactic astrophysics since the beginning of his career, which started in the field of AGN surveys using Einstein and EXOSAT X-ray data. A good fraction of his scientific work has been dedicated to multi-frequency studies of blazars, an activity that resulted in many well known publications, making Paolo one of the world experts in the field. Other important topics in Paolo's scientific interests are Gamma-ray bursts and cosmology. The latest major scientific activity is the coordination of multi-frequency observations of samples of extragalactic sources requiring a large number of simultaneous observations carried out with space (Planck, Swift and Fermi) and ground based facilities.
Paolo was awarded the "Bruno Rossi Prize" four times, in 1998, 2007, 2011 and 2012 as a key player of the BeppoSAX, Swift, Fermi and AGILE teams.