About Me

I was born in Tirana (Albania) to artist parents. My father is considered the best modern-style painter of the Communist era. Here is a 2021 Albanian documentary in his memory. After mourning my father who passed away when I was 15 days old, my mother fled the country in 1991 alone but with me as a toddler.

We then migrated to Italy, where I had the privilege of assimilating into its rich cultural heritage. My love for astrophysics began in kindergarten and has remained unchanged since. In middle school, I become close friends with Italian Astrophysicist and former Observatory Director Margherita Hack with whom I co-authored a bestseller during high school.

I obtained my high school diploma in the selective (3.5% acceptance rate) United World College of the Adriatic, and subsequently received scholarships that helped me attend the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, where I was a double major in Applied Mathematics and Physics. In 2011 I joined the Supernova Cosmology group in the HEP Division of Argonne National Laboratory. Our research efforts led me to win the Chambliss Medal for exemplary research.

I continued conducting research at ANL until the start of my graduate studies at the University of Trieste, where I lead the development of a dust evolution code within zoom-in cosmological simulations of galaxy clusters. I earned a Ph.D. in Physics in Spring 2019. In Fall 2019 I joined the newly-established Astronomy group at Wuhan University. Here I designed and developed GalCEM, a detailed isotopic galactic chemical evolution code. In 2022 I began my second postdoc at Nanjing University.