C. Marcella Carollo facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
C. Marcella Carollo
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| Born |
Palermo, Italy
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| Nationality | Italian and Swiss |
| Alma mater | Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (PhD) |
| Known for | Galaxy formation and evolution Extragalactic astronomy |
| Spouse(s) | Simon Lilly |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astronomy Astrophysics |
| Institutions | ETH Zürich Leiden University |
C. Marcella Carollo worked as a professional astronomer for 25 years between 1994 and 2019. Her scientific career was ended by the ETH Zürich who, following accusations that she had bullied students, made her the first Professor to be dismissed at ETH Zurich in the 165 years of its history. Carollo has maintained her innocence against these accusations, publicly commenting on her case in terms that indicate "academic mobbing". The dismissal was appealed unsuccessfully to the Swiss Federal Administrative Court.
The case has attracted considerable controversy. It has become a prime exhibit in the debate about due process and the preservation of basic legal rights within academia, especially in German-speaking universities.
Education
Carollo began her studies at the University of Palermo where she earned a laurea degree in physics in 1987, with a specialization in biophysics. She worked for more than four years outside of academia before starting a PhD in astrophysics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she graduated in 1994.
Career
Carollo was awarded a European Community Prize Fellowship, which she held at Leiden University from 1994 to 1996. She held a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University from 1997 to 1999. Carollo was appointed Assistant Professor in the Astronomy Department at Columbia University in 1999, a position she held until 2002. That year, she moved to ETH Zurich as an Associate Professor, in a dual appointment with her spouse Simon Lilly. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2007. She contributed as a member of the Science Oversight Committee to the development of the WFC3 camera which was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. In 2012, she entered the Top Italian Scientist list from VIA Academy and in 2013 she was awarded the Winton Capital Research Prize. In 2018, she was identified as a Highly Cited Researcher for her research work at ETH between 2006 and 2016 – one of only about 20 ETH scientists so recognized.
Research
Carollo's contribution to astronomy is in the fields of extragalactic astronomy and specifically galaxy formation and evolution. Her early work established the relation between the metallicity gradient and stellar mass in galactic spheroids, demonstrated the presence of dark matter halos beyond their half-light radii and was seminal in discovering and characterizing disk-like (pseudo) bulges and nuclear massive star clusters in disk galaxies like the Milky Way. Later she and her ETH group worked on the role of galactic environment and progenitor bias in galaxy evolution, the growth and "quenching" of massive galaxies at high redshifts, and participated in the discovery and characterization of the most distant galaxies in the universe, in the heart of the reionization epoch.
