VALERIA PETTORINO

Euclid Space Satellite

In 2007 I joined the Euclid Consortium, an international collaboration encompassing 1900 members worldwide, with the aim of building a space satellite (financed by ESA, NASA and national agencies) that will fly in 2022.
Euclid detectors will be in the visible and near-infrared and will measure about 10 billions of galaxy shapes and 50 millions of galaxy spectra.

My responsabilities include:

- co-leading the inter science taskforce (IST:F) that validates the forecast pipeline, i.e. the expected performance of the satellite;

- co-leading the IST:Likelihood, the taskforce that will be in charge of developing the Euclid likelihood, i.e. the software used to compare data with theoretical predictions;

- leading the Review on 'Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite' that gives an overview of the science that can be done with Euclid;

- co-leading the Euclid Communication group in 2011-2013

- being CEA representative for Euclid France Communication team since 2018, aiming at public outreach of Euclid technological and scientific challenges for media and general public;

- chairing the Euclid Prize Committee for 2017-2018, aiming at giving visibility to outstanding contributions to collaboration work, mainly by researchers with fixed-term contracts.

[Artist views of the Euclid Satellite – © ESA]

Planck Space Satellite

Planck was a space satellite financed by ESA, NASA and national space agencies, sent to space in 2009 and operating for about 2 years to observe the Cosmic Microwave Radiation, the light emitted in the Universe about 13 billions years ago, allowing us to reconstruct the evolution and content of the Universe up to that early epoch.

I worked for Planck from 2009 to 2018 and my responsibilities included:
coordinating the part of the Planck data analysis devoted to the interpretation of Dark Energy and Modified Gravity. This work resulted in a collaboration paper (available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01590) of which I was corresponding author. Press release available below.

Science to Data Science

I am Alumni (2016) of Science to Data Science, Europe’s largest data science training programme. Run by Pivigo, it consists in five weeks of intensive, project-based training turning Scientists into Data Scientists. During my project-based training, I worked in a team for an Internet of Things (IOT) project on healthcare. Given different databases (simulated and real, in different formats) on patients, labs and health parameters (pressure, blood, ...) I had to identify rules and correlation among parameters to alert the patient of the potential onset of a specific disease. The main software language used for the project was python.

In 2016, after my S2DS training, I took part to a data science meetup in Heidelberg, where I first learned about the EuroPython community.

The EuroPython Society (EPS) is a Swedish non-profit organization which organizes EuroPython conferences, supports the Python community in Europe.

The annual EuroPython Conference involves about 1100 attendees, from academia and industry, interested in a variety of applications of python programming language.

I gave a talk in the 2016 edition and then volunteered to help with the organization in 2017 and 2018. In 2018 I joined the EuroPython Society Board, where I am currently helping to organize the 2019 edition.

SELECTED PROJECTS

Highlights from the projects I am involved in, within research, data science, communication and mentoring.