🪪 About us
Guido Agapito
INAF - Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri
Florence, Italy
He is a senior researcher in the Adaptive Optics group at INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri. An automation engineer by training, he specializes in the control, modeling, and simulation of dynamical systems, as well as data reduction. With over 10 years of experience in astronomical adaptive optics, he leads the numerical simulation team at Arcetri. He contributed to the design and commissioning of SOUL at the LBT and ERIS at the VLT. He is currently involved in several major projects, including MORFEO, MAVIS, and ANDES at the ELT. He is also the lead developer of PASSATA and a key contributor to TipTop and Specula.
Carlo Felice Manara
Arseniy Kuznetsov
European Southern Observatory
Arseniy Kuznetsov is a postdoctoral researcher at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), where he has been working since 2020. He obtained his doctorate in 2024 and has nearly five years of experience in astronomical adaptive optics (AO), focusing on AO simulations and focal-plane wavefront retrieval. His expertise spans high-performance software development for optical simulations, computer graphics, and computer vision, as well as machine learning applications in astronomical instrumentation. He is one of the key contributors to the TipTop project.
Lisa-Marie Mazzolo
Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille
Marseille, France
Lisa-Marie Mazzolo is an engineer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and at ONERA (France), where she contributes to research and development activities in high-resolution space observation. She obtained her PhD in 2024 at ONERA, focusing on advanced numerical modelling and simulation methods for radar cross-section evaluation. She then conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at LAM, working on the modelling of multi-conjugate adaptive optics systems for extremely large telescopes. Her current work focuses on high-resolution space observation, with applications in space situational awareness and astronomical instrumentation.
Benoit Neichel
Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille
Marseille, France
Benoit Neichel is a CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille where he leads the research and development group. He obtained his doctorate in 2008, conducting integral field spectroscopy observations of distant galaxies using Wide Field Adaptive Optics. He then worked at the Gemini South Telescope for nearly five years as the scientific lead for the GeMS instrument. In 2013, he joined LAM, and he is currently involved in preparing for the future Extremely Large Telescope, serving as the deputy-PI for the HARMONI project.
Fabio Rossi
INAF - Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica
Florence, Italy
Fabio Rossi is a software engineer and PhD in Computer Science. For almost a decade, he has been working at INAF, Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, as a member of the Adaptive Optics group. He was involved in the design, development and commissioning of SOUL, AO system for LBT, and he is currently involved in ELT ANDES and VLT MAVIS. His research interests include Adaptive Optics simulation and software design, High Performance Computing, and Machine Learning. He is one of the main developers of the analytical AO simulation framework TipTop and of the end-to-end AO simulation framework SPECULA.