Davide Maino

Davide Maino is an astrophysicist and Associate Professor at the Department of Physics at the University of Milan. He earned his PhD in Astrophysics from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste in 1999. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Trieste Astronomical Observatory, where he began developing the framework for what would become the data reduction and analysis pipeline for the Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) aboard the Planck satellite—an European Space Agency (ESA) mission dedicated to the study of the cosmic microwave background. He returned to Milan in 2002 as a researcher in the University of Milan’s Physics Department.

After overseeing subsequent analysis phases of the Planck mission, he joined the Euclid collaboration—another ESA space project aimed at investigating the dark components (matter and energy) that make up our universe.

Within Euclid, he serves as the scientific lead and deputy of the Italian Data Processing Centre in Trieste. Recently, he returned to cosmic background research by joining the team for the Japanese LiteBird mission, aiming at precise measurements of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background—an extremely faint yet invaluable signal for understanding the early stages of the universe.