Marco Pierbattista

Where I come from

About myself

Since I have memory I’ve always been fascinated by “why things are as they appear”. I’ve always been curious about everything that happened around me, I’ve always tried to search for a deeper explanation of what I used to sense. Growing up in a house lost in the countryside gave me the opportunity to experience the Nature as a pioneer: to taste the grass, to observe the organization of the insect colonies, the structure of the leaves, to understand the seasonal recurrence of the constellation patterns on a perfectly dark sky.

I was nearly eleven years old when I asked my parents for a telescope. At that time I was already reading about astronomy since some time and I managed to collect books and magazines about Astronomy; my mother used to buy me a monthly astronomy magazine and VHS with explanations of the most fascinating astronomical phenomena. When my telescope arrived it was like I’ve always had it and I started to discover the Universe. I discovered the moon, Jupiter, Saturn’s satellites and rings, I used to wake up at 5 in the morning to observe Venus and to note on a book all details of my observations. I discovered that Jupiter has more than 4 satellites, the red surface of Mars, I observed the bright clouds of Venus, the green ray of the raising sun, the moon craters. I was a scientist before to know what a scientist is.

My passion for science, in particular for Astronomy, led me through the most important steps of my life and brought me around the world. I graduated in Astronomy at Bologna University and from there I moved to Sardinia to work on my master thesis about Pulsars. After defending my Master’s thesis in December 2006, in February 2007 I moved to Paris where a few months later I started a PhD in Pulsar Astrophysics. After defending my PhD thesis in December 2010 I worked for a while in Paris and after about 5 years living in France, I relocated to Milan, Italy, for a post doc contract. After Milan I moved to Poland, Toruń first and to Lublin after, for other post docs and it was in Poland that I realized that being a scientist does not require to be a researcher. 

During my research career I had the possibility to work with and learn an incredible amount of things from excellent scientists in many different places of the world. I traveled to many places in the USA, in Canada, Japan, Russia, Namibia, almost all the European countries. I lived in many cities and I met an incredible amount of incredible people. I could experience that passion for science and the impulse to explore the World are two of the primary human instincts through which progress is achieved.

In Warsaw, Poland, I quit academic research and I joined industry as Data Scientist for Accenture. In Poland I lived for 7 years, I married my wife Patrycja and we adopted our dog, Frania but in 2021 we made the decision to relocated to Switzerland.

If I look at my past I see nothing else than myself now. I still have the same approach to things, the same curiosity, the same will to learn, discover, understand, travel who knows where next. I am a scientist, still ignoring what a scientist is