A staff researcher at the INAF OAR since 2018, millisecond pulsars are my favourite astrophysical toys. Their extreme properties make them unique probes of how matter behaves at extremely high densities and how the particles accelerated by a pulsar interact with the plasma lost by a companion star. I started playing with these quickly spinning neutron stars during my Master thesis in Rome and kept staring at them during my journey across the Mediterranean with stops in Cagliari, Barcelona, and back in Rome in 2016 with a Marie Skłodowska Curie individual fellowship. Initially trained as an X-ray astronomer, I have expanded my interests to the radio, optical and gamma-ray wavebands. Discovering the first millisecond pulsar swinging back and forth between a radio pulsar and an X-ray pulsar state and spotting for the first time optical pulsations from a millisecond pulsar are perhaps my favourite babies. Across the years, magnetars, gamma-ray binaries and ultra-luminous X-ray pulsars have become other topics of interest in my research. Currently, the development and exploitation of the fast optical photometer SiFAP2 are among my main tasks. I am also teaching lectures on pulsars in the “High Energy Astrophysics” class held by Luigi Stella at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Personal website: https://alessandropapitto.wordpress.com/