Speakers 2021

Francesco Pepe started his professional career in 1992 as physicist at the ETHZ where, as part of his PhD thesis, he designed and developed a far-infrared balloon-borne spectrometer. Today, he is specialised in astronomical instrumentation for the search and characterisation of exoplanets.

In 1998, Francesco Pepe arrived at the University of Geneva Department of Astronomy to pursue research in infrared astronomy. However, he was assigned  shortly after to the HARPS project, for which he served as Project Manager and the System Engineer. HARPS was installed and successfully commissioned during October 2003 on ESO 3.6m telescope in La Silla (Chile) and has since proven one of the world's most sensitive planet-hunting machines.

Since 2019, Francesco Pepe serves as the director of the Department of Astronomy.

Associate Professor
for Exoplanets and Habitability,
ETH Zurich,
Department of Physics

Current research:

Detection and Characterization of terrestrial exoplanets at 
ETH Zurich

Sascha Quanz studied Physics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and obtained a “Diploma in Physics” in 2004. His final Diploma Thesis project was carried out at the former Manned Spaceflight Department of the European Space Agency and dealt with the accurate simulation of spacecraft and rocket trajectories. He continued to obtain a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and graduated in 2007 with distinction. His PhD Thesis dealt with the formation processes and environment of young planetary systems.

Before he joined ETH Zurich, he worked from 2007 until 2009 as management consultant for McKinsey & Company in Germany. Between 2009 and 2019 he first was a post-doc, then Oberassistent and finally tenured Senior Scientist at ETH in the former Star and Planet Formation Group.

In 2019 he was appointed as Associate Professor for Exoplanets & Habitability. To enable the detection and characterization of terrestrial exoplanets and assess their habitability his research group carries out astronomical observations on state-of-the-art telescopes, contributes to the development of key technologies and instruments for world-leading facilities and designs powerful data processing algorithms and statistical frameworks to interpret the data.

Brice-Olivier Demory is Professor of Astrophysics SNSF at the University of Bern. He obtained his MSc in physics from EPFL and PhD from the University of Geneva under the supervision of Prof. Didier Queloz. Afterwards, Demory spent three years at MIT (USA) to work on two NASA exoplanet missions and three others at the University of Cambridge (UK). He leads in Bern a research group focusing on the search and characterisation of Earth-sized exoplanets. Among the different projects he is involved in, Demory is working with his team on the development of new instrumentation for the remote detection of life beyond the Earth. He is striving to develop societal applications through his research, such as the BrainPol project, in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine, which is investigating in-vivo non-invasive cancer diagnosis and staging techniques. Demory is recipient of the Royal Society and Rutherford Fellowships.

CSH SNF Professor (Astronomy/
Astrophysics)
at the University of Bern

Current research:

Detection & Characterization of  exoplanets,          Astronomical Instrumentation at the University of Bern

CHEOPS Instrument Scientist at
the University of Bern

and CHEOPS Science Team member at the University of Bern

• 2009 PhD in Astronomy, Giant Planet Formation Models at Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas de La Plata, Argentina

• 1 year postdoc in Argentina

• 2010 Postdoc at UniBE. Topic of research: planet and planetary systems models 

• Since 2013 CHEOPS Instrument Scientist at UniBE and CHEOPS Science Team Member

As CHEOPS Instrument Scientist:

• I was at the interface between the engineers and the scientists while building the instrument 

• I was/am the coordinator of several Science Team Working Groups, 

• I was in charge of the coordination and planning of the In-Orbit Commissioning of CHEOPS

• currently in charge of the monitoring and characterisation of the CHEOPS instrument performance

Ph.D. student in Computational Physics at the University of Zürich - Institute for Computational Science

Current research:

Evolution of giant planets with heavy-element enrichment at the
University of Zurich

Claudio Valetta completed his Master of Science Degree in Physics at the University of Milan.

Since 2017 he is a Ph.D, in Computational Physics at the University of Zürich, where he is working on “Evolution of giant planets with heavy-element enrichment” under the Supervision of Professor Ravit Helled.

He does scientific outreach on Youtube and Instagram (in Italian).

Ph.D. student at the 
University of Zürich

Current research:

Numerical methods for planet formation at the University of Zürich

Marco Cilibrasi was a Bachelor's and Master's student at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy). During his Master's, he started working on planet and moon detection thanks to a short data analysis project in Princeton (USA), to then switch to planet and moon formation for his Master's thesis, which he completed at UZH under the supervision of Prof. Judit Szulagyi (ETH) and Prof. Lucio Mayer (UZH).

He then started his Ph.D. with the same supervisors at UZH in the framework of the NCCR Planets, where he is still working on numerical methods for planet formation.

I was born in Oxford, UK. In 2012 I started my undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cambridge University, after which I stayed in Cambridge to do a master's in astrophysics. In 2017 I moved to the University of Bern to start my PhD with Professor Kevin Heng, where I study the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. 

Ph.D. student at the             University of Bern

Current research:

Development of atmospheric retrieval methods for extrasolar planets