Alessandro Marzo

My name is Alessandro Marzo and I’m from Pesaro, Italy. If you never heard if it, just know that it is famous for two things: 1) it is the birthplace of the famous Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini and 2) it’s the only place in Italy where you will find mayo and boiled eggs on a pizza, named after the composer himself.

I’m currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Applied Physics at the University of Bologna, focusing on Medical Physics and High Performance Computing. I’ve always loved Physics so much that during my studies I struggled to choose one topic to focus on and I switched fields a couple of times. That is until I discovered High Performance Computing! To me HPC is the perfect balance between theory and experiments. Carrying out a computational simulation of some complex physical process (that can match experimental results) allows you to have a higher form of understanding of the phenomenon, while acquiring practical knowledge in the meantime. And in hindsight, I realized this is the reason that I first decided to study Physics, and the reason why after my Master studies I intend to pursue a Phd in Computational Physics.

But that’s not everything about me! I also love hiking and enjoy long walks in the city or by the beach. While at home, I like to spend my free time reading books and watching movies and TV shows. I am a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, but I also like Lars von Trier, so I am pretty excited to visit the country where he comes from this summer!

Me hiking in the Dolomites

I am going to spend the summer in Denmark – the happiest country of the world, at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen working on the project Tracing in 4D data. My task is to implement a parallel version of tracing algorithms for muscle tissue in 3D over time to study and visualize the fast micrometer scale internal movements of small animals, in my case blowflies, while they try to escape from lethal doses of radiations that we need to make nice pictures of them!

Here’s me presenting in parallel with my friend Konstantinos Koukas: