Dr. Santi Cassisi is a world-recognized expert in stellar evolution, and main creator and maintainer of the widely used BaSTI stellar evolution library. Stellar evolution is basic for many research lines, therefore his contributions to the IAC can span over the FEEI, MWLG, and FEYG SO lines. He began his career with a Grant of the Ministry for Scientific Research of the French Government since in 1993, spent at the Astronomical Observatory of Meudon-Paris. Then he had a PhD fellowship in Physics at the University of L'Aquila since 1995 to 1997.

Dr. Cassisi is a staff researcher at the INAF - Astronomical Observatory of "Collurania" - Teramo since 1998. His main research fields are theoretical stellar evolution and its application to the study of both galactic and extra-galactic stellar populations. In this field, he has published about 450 scientific papers so far, about 290 are referred publications and two monographs for students and researchers.

During the last few years the BaSTI library has undergone an important update, as a result of a collaboration between IAC researchers and the BaSTI team. A new collaboration will be opened with the research groups working on exoplanets, interested to the characterization of the planet host star by using the BaSTI-IAC library. It will be developed a series of tools for population synthesis for galactic stellar studies and make them available to the various research groups at the IAC. They will exploit the large parameter space of the updated BaSTI-IAC library (metallicity, helium, alpha abundances).

Dr. Cassisi will give a general seminar on the current status of stellar evolution models, the uncertainties and their impact on stellar population studies. Moreover, Dr. Cassisi has large teaching experience, and he is available to give one or more classes for master and PhD students on specific topics related to Stellar Evolution, Stellar populations, Distance indicators. etc.