Professional experiences (Current position):

Since May 2005 I am employed by MasterCard Europe as Business Finance Officer (BFO). I am responsabile for the Budget/Forecast as well as Business planning and Controlling. In particular:

• Since October 2007 I am the BFO for the European Regional Accounts. This function reports directly to the Head of Finance MasterCard Europe and to the Head of Sales of the European Regional Accounts.

• From May 2005 till Oct 2007 I was the BFO for Southern Europe covering several countries (Spain/Portugal, Italy/Greece, France, Turkey).

In both roles, the first ones more focused on customers, the second ones more focused on countries, main responsabilities always includes, but were not limited to, Budget/Forecast and Planning/Controlling. In particular:

I act as interface between Finance Europe Department in Waterloo and all the Country

Managers/Account Managers in order to deliver the agreed Budget. I am involved on a regularly basis with all Country and Account Managers in order to make sure that Business is performing as expected and that all procedures and policies are respected. I act as guardian of the Budget by checking monthly, quarterly and yearly the actual performances vs. Budget and vs. prior year as well as responsible to make an assessment of risks and opportunities on a quarterly basis. I ensure that, within each Country, each Account Team has accurate vision of the expenses and of the Revenues and that each department is following the relevant policies. I agree a challenge as well as feasible Budgets for each of the Countries/Customers both on Revenues as well as on the Expenses. I support the Country Managers in several activies related to the business and I play a key role in the business planning by making sure that Customers‘planning and Countries’ Budgets are aligned.

I play a key role in evaluating possible increase/decrease of resources taking into account the Budget's contraints.

I have an active role during all Budget's phase (preparation,submission negotiation and finalization) during which I have regular meetings with the top managment of MasterCard Europe (Head of Continental Europe, Chief Financial Officer, Head of Regional Key Accounts Europe and several Country Managers).

From November 2003 till May 2005 :

Hubble Space Telescope Science Data Analyst at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at the Space Telescope European Co-ordinating Facility (ST-ECF) Instrument Physical Modeling group (IPMG). We were responsible for the Calibration Enhancement (CE) project, which aims to enhance the ostensibly empirical data reduction pipelines developed at the Space Telescope Science Institue (STScI) by the addition of physically motivated solutions to specific calibration problems.

I was involved in the implementation of a physical model of the Spectrograph of Hubble Space Telescope in order to improve its calibration. Advanced optimization techniques were used (Simulated Annealing) in order to achieve the highest accuracy. Operative systems were Unix/Linux and the programming languages were C/C++. I did act as interface between the Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore and the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility in Garching (Germany) concerning all the Software changes. I was also involved in the model of another spectrograph (CRIRES) which will be mounted to the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

From January 2001 till October 2003:

Employed by LSE GmbH at the European Space Agency premises (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany as Spacecraft and On Board Software Engineer for the Huygens mission.

I was responsible for all the maintenance activities concerning the Huygens “On Board Software”. I produced, test and validated procedures with particular focus about the on board software. I managed the contacts between ESA and the worldwide industrial partners concerning the incoming on board software modifications. I prepared, tested, validated and executed the patches for the 1750A on board processor in ADA and assembler languages.

Responsibility also included to follow up and test the correct implementation of the new Probe On Board Software release as delivered by industry.

As member of the Huygens Flight Control Team I was involved in all operational activities like in-flight check-out tests, testing new tools concerning the New Huygens mission, updating the contingency recovery procedures, writing new procedures and in-flight check-out reports. I managed the contacts between ESA and the external industrial parties as well as between ESA and the Principal Investigators.

As a member of the Huygens Implementation Team (HIT) of the New Huygens recovery mission I was involved in all the tests concerning the instrument software patches and instrument hardware upgrade. Responsibility also included proposal/implement and test feasibly solutions in order to avoid single point failure for both the Probe and the instruments.

As a member of the joint ESA-NASA mission (Huygens - Cassini) I was trained on the Mission Control System used in the Jet propulsion Laboratory of Pasadena in California and I managed all the operational activites with the co-located Huygens team in JPL.

From August 2000 till December 2000:

Employed by Rhea group for a study concerning a mission planning algorithm. I was involved in the initial analysis and design and I started the first implementation in C++. Tools used : Rational Rose, Visual C++.

From September 1998 till August 2000:

During this period I worked as software engineer for different projects for the European Space Agency’s Operations control Center in Darmstadt (Germany) as a contractor of Vitrociset S.p.A. of Rome – Italy.

In particular:

From October 1999 to end of July 2000:

Software Engineer for Integral mission particular involved on On Board Software Maintenance (OBSM) subsystem. I managed the development, implementation and tests of Integral OBSM inherited from SCOS2000 OBSM. The technoloy framework is founded on SUN machine with Unix 2.6 version. Throughout the SCOS-2000 project I have done extensively use of C++ programming language as well as of ILOGviews development toolkit. I extensively used also the the ObjectSpace Standard Components Library (STL) to model commonly used C++ constructs and container classes.

Concerning the design phase I used the Rational Rose tool to build the class hierarchy before the development and to do the reverse engineering after it. All the documentations were done by Microsoft Office 97.

The debugging phases and version control was coped by Workshop tool. To avoid memory leaks, a final check of the program was realized by Purify tool.

All the verification phases of the software were realized coherently with ESA Standard (PSS-05).

From July 1999 to November1999:

I worked on Meteosat second generation (MSG) satellite mainly involved on:

• Generic multi mission packetizer and specific packetizer concerning the MSG satellite system.

• MMI concerning the MSG database tool.

Throughout MSG I used the C++ language , ILOGviews toolkit, CORBA and ObjectStore technology on SUN machine with Unix operative system.

From September 1998 July 1999:

During this period I was involved in the maintenance of the software package dedicated to the control operations of the Huygens, PROBA and SOHO missions.

Throughout this period I used the C/C++ language , ILOGviews toolkit, CORBA and ObjectStore technology on SUN machine with Unix operative system. Some Unix script was necessary in order to perform daily tasks.

• From August 1997 to September 1998

Software Engineer for the SICRAL project as employed at Dataspazio S.p.A (DATAMAT group) in Rome. During this period I was involved in the study, development and implementation of the SICRAL satellite simulator; in particular:

I was involved in Detailed Design and Development in C++ of the following models related to the Italian Spacecraft SICRAL:

• Development of the software model of the SICRAL spacecraft orbit and attitude dynamics.

• Momentum Wheels.

• Development of the satellite’s telemetry and telecommand chains. Development of bidimensional and tridimensional mimics, using the Dataviews tools, in order to provide and display the spacecraft position and attitude as well as the Sun/Earth sensor views

Throughout SICRAL project I used ALPHA machine with VMS operative system. The C language and X-designer toolkit were the basic technology I used on this project. The mimics were realized by Dataviews toolkit.

Education.

Degree in Physics (110/110) at the University "La Sapienza" of Roma on May 1997.

Thesis’ title: "Primordial vacuum: analysis of the large scale structure of the universe and its comparison with bubbles models", where the bubbles models were simulated by numerical algorithms. The work was centered on the analysis of several galaxies’ catalogs (such as LEDA, APM, SSRS1, CfA and Las-Campanas).

The work’s intermediate goal was to understand how to manage the data and calculate the power spectrum for each survey in all the catalogs. The final one, was to interpret the contradictory results against the Cosmological Principle and compare these with simulated galaxies-distribution obtained by several numerical simulations.

The numerical simulations were realized in Fortran 77 on HP-UNIX machine and by Mathematica 3.0 tool.

Observational experience:

Thee months at the Monteporzio-Catone observatory. Goal: estimate the age of Plejadi cluster. In order to achieve it, I had to calibrate the CCD of the camera connected to the telescope and had to manage its criogenic system. I developed a specific software in Fortran 77 for image processing.

Computer skills.

Operative System:

Very good knowledge of Linux (kde) and Unix. Good knowledge of XP. Basic skills on VMS.

Programming languages:

Very good knowledge of C/C++ and Fortran 77 languages especially on UNIX systems.

Basic knowledge of assembler on 1750A processor.

Programming tools:

Sunstudio, g++,gcc, DDD, Workshop, Rational Rose, Purify, ILOG solver. .

Projects Methods:

Object oriented analysis and design, Knowledge of ESA Standard (PSS-05) and ESA

standard methods of software verification and validation.

Knowledge and test of the Critical Software system’s guidelines as requested for interplanetary mission.

Scientific Software:

IRAF, python, Mathematica 5.0, Matlab 6, working experience with Fortran – C numerical recipes routines. Scientific Word 2.0, Latex.

Other Softwares:

Good knowledge of the Microsoft Office Word/Excel/Power Point.

Languages:

Italian mother tongue.

English and German fluent.

Other courses:

Win-Win negotiation (Jan 2008) at Mastercard University