UNIVERSITY OF CAGLIARI
Physics Department
Complesso universitario di Monserrato
SP Sestu-Monserrato km 0.7
I-09042 Monserrato (CA), Italy

Nicolò D'Amico (Nichi) is Chair Professor of Astrophysics at Cagliari University, in Sardinia (Italy). He is also Director of the Cagliari Astronomical Observatory and leader of the Italian Pulsar Group, founded in Bologna and now based in Cagliari

He is interested in searching and studying neutron stars and exploit their observational properties to probe gravitational theories, stellar evolution, and ultra dense matter. In Italy, he set up a pulsar observing system at the Northern Cross radio telescope, near Bologna, where he has carried out a pulsar search experiment with high sensitivity to the limiting spin period of neutron stars. Since many years he has been mostly engaged in the development of several pulsar search experiments at Parkes, in Australia, in collaboration with Dick Manchester and Andrew Lyne. Among the milestones which were established with such experiments, it shows up the discovery of the highly relativistic binary pulsar PSR 0737-3039, which turned out to be also the first ever known Double Pulsar, and it is considered an astrophysical holy grail. In the context of these experiments, he has trained several PhD students, including Marta Burgay and Andrea Possenti, which are now staff members of his research group in Cagliari. Since 2006 he is in charge of the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) Project.