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. After his degree in Physics at the University of Pisa, he began his career with a Grant of the Ministry for Scientific Research of the French Government in 1993 at the Astronomical Observatory of Meudon-Paris. Then he had a PhD fellowship in Physics at the University of L'Aquila from 1995 to 1997.
Dr. Cassisi has been a staff researcher at the INAF - Astronomical Observatory of "Collurania" - Teramo since 1998 and since 2016 He is full professor at the INAF - Astronomical Observatory of Abruzzo. 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 515 scientific papers so far, about 320 are publications on peer-review journals and two monographs for students and researchers, with about 26200 citations and an H-index of 85.
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, which has resulted in the BaSTI-IAC library. A main current collaboration of Dr. Cassisi with IAC researchers is that with the ChronoGal project, which aims at deriving the star formation history of the various Milky Way components, and to trace the main accretion events that have characterised its early formation process. For this, ChronoGal uses Gaia color-magnitude diagrams and synthetic ones computed with the BaSTI-IAC library using the population synthesis code developed by Dr. Cassisi.
New collaborations will be opened during his stay at the IAC as, e.g. that with the research groups working on exoplanets, interested to the characterization of the planet host star by using the BaSTI-IAC library, as well as the IAC group working on asteroseismology. The plan is also to develop some 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, heavy element mixtures, etc.).
Since the beginning of 2022, Dr. Cassisi has been a member of the Board of the Fundación Galileo Galilei - INAF, Fundación Canaria, which manages the Galileo National Telescope (TNG) at La Palma.
