ESCAPE - The European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 824064.
Martino is anAstronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), stationed at the Headquarters in Garching bei München (Germany). Before joining ESO,he was at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (USA) and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy),from whichhereceivedhis PhDin Physics in October 1998.
He shares his (work) time between research and functional duties. For the former, his main line of research is currently on Cepheid stars as a high-precision tool to determine cosmic distances, and specifically how they can be used to measure the current rate of expansion of the Universe (Hubble constant) to the accuracy required to pinpoint the nature of Dark Energy and Cosmic Acceleration.
On the functional side, he is the Head of ESO’s Back-end Operations Department, which is charged with the handling of the science data from the La Silla Paranal Observatory, and, a few years down the line, of ESO’s next big science machine, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). The department is responsible for the operations and development of the ESO Science Archive, both in terms of data content and user services, and for the development of the ESO data processing tools and infrastructure.
In ESCAPE, he is the co-lead of Task 4.3, within the CEVO Work Package, and the elected Chair of the General Assembly.