Massimo Taronna

Massimo has been a "studente ordinario" at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and obtained his PhD in September 2012 at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa under the supervision of Prof. Augusto Sagnotti. After that he held research positions at the Max Plank Institute in Berlin, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Princeton University. In 2015 he was awarded a FNRS chargé de recherches fellowship, in 2016 a Marie Curie Global fellowship and in 2017 he was awarded a Montalcini Fellowship (2015 call) from the Italian Research Minister and moved back to Italy in Naples at "Federico II". In 2022 Massimo has won as national PI a PRIN2022 grant of the Italian government and in 2023 he was awarded as PI an ERC-CoG-2023 grant from the European Research Council.

Massimo's research revolves around string theory and the holographic principle at the interface of cosmology and the gauge/gravity duality. A key goal of Massimo's research is to extend modern ideas and methods developed in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence to a more general class of spacetimes. These include spacetimes experiencing an accelerated phase of expansion, like those describing our own Universe but also asymptotically flat space times. The models and mathematical tools Massimo applies in his research include conformal field theory, string theory, quantum information and quantum field theory in low and higher dimensions. One of Massimo's research goals is to identify holographic non-perturbative consistency requirements for quantum gravity beyond AdS space.