Prof. Dr. Serena Viti

Serena Viti's research interests span a very wide range of topics but they are all centered around the role of molecules in space, especially in the dense gas of the interstellar medium and star forming regions in our own as well as in other galaxies. Molecules pervade the cooler, denser parts of our Universe, in particular the reservoirs of the matter that forms stars and planets, and the gas in the centres of galaxies. In the Milky Way and nearby galaxies,
we routinely use molecules to discover and explore these regions and the more complex the chemistry, the more details of the gas the molecules reveal. Serena Viti's group's research concentrates on the development of methodologies for the interpretation of molecular observations and on devising novel techniques for astrochemistry involving
machine learning.

 
After studying at Queen Mary and Westfield College (University of London), Serena Viti completed her PhD in 1997 from University College London in the area of molecular
astrophysics applied to low mass stars. After her PhD she started working in the field of star formation and astrochemistry. After a couple of postdoctoral fellowships in UK and abroad, she was awarded the STFC Advanced Fellowship in 2003 which was hosted at UCL; she became a n assistant Professor in 2003 and  was promoted to full Professor in 2012. From 2016 to 2020 she was the Head of the Astrophysics Group. In 2019, she was awarded an Advanced ERC (MOPPEX) and moved to a full Professorship in Molecular Astrophysics at Leiden University. She is currently working at Leiden University but will already be spending time researching and teaching at the University of Bonn over the next two years in order to establish the research field for her Hertz Professorship.