Members

Senior Scientist - International Research School of Planetary Sciences
Associate Professor - Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Geologia (INGEO)
Università d'Annunzio
Italy

Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona (Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A.)

My father was doing business in the world for the oil and steel industries that were the backbones of the 20^th century. Because of his work I grew up in Houston, Texas, often called the Energy Capital of the World, during the 1960s and 1970s. It was the time of the Apollo program with the aim to land humans on the Moon for the first time in history. Since the central activity of human flight missions was conducted at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, I was always feeling close to space, playing with toys such as water-powered rockets. And as Texas reminds us about the cowboy culture, I was dressed up like them, running around outdoors. It was natural that I chose to aim at space, studying it, and chose geology as the research area since it allows me work in the field.

Now, I am doing research mostly in Planetary Geology, a subfield of Planetary Sciences. I have been involved in the Planetary Exploration Research Center (PERC) from its inception, and I have been a witness of its success and development as an outsider but also as a guest scientist. I hope to be able to keep contributing to research coming out of the Chiba Institute of Technology for years to come.