C. Marcella Carollo

Education

Carollo began her studies at the University of Palermo. There she earned a laurea degree in physics in 1987, with a specialization in biophysics. She continued in astrophysics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, earning her PhD 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 2001. She moved to ETH Zurich as an Associate Professor in 2002. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2007. In 2012, she entered the Top Italian Scientist list from VIA Academy and in 2013 she was awarded the Winton Capital Research Prize.

Research

Carollo has contributed to astronomy in the fields of extragalactic astronomy and galaxy formation and evolution. Her early work established the relation between the metallicity gradient and stellar mass in galactic spheroids, and demonstrated the presence of dark matter halos beyond their half-light radii. She also proved that the kinematically decoupled cores in local spheroids have identical stellar population properties to their counter-rotating envelopes. She went on to discover that the vast majority of local disk galaxies host super star clusters and exponential-like spheroids (called pseudo-bulges),also demonstrating that a large fraction of pseudo-bulges are very old and are close analogues of the Milky Way's bulge. While at ETH, she led a numerical program that proved the now widely accepted idea that old pseudo-bulges can be the result of early dynamical instabilities within dense disks at high redshifts. She has been a core member of the international COSMOS collaboration, within which she led the development and application of the Zurich Estimator of Structural Types (ZEST), and the Zurich Extragalactic Bayesian Redshift Analyzer ZEBRA. Her group discovered and characterized large populations of galaxies in the heart of the reionization epoch, and participated in the discovery of candidates at z ~ 10, as well as of the distant astronomical objects UDFy-38135539 and UDFj-39546284. She led a numerical program that characterized the dependence on environment, at different epochs, of the formation histories, shapes and angular momenta of dark matter haloes. Much of Carollo's most recent work has focused on inferring the role of progenitor bias effects in the interpretation of evolutionary trends with redshift and of the impact of the super-galactic environment on galaxy evolution, both with the Zurich ENvironmental Study (ZENS) and with other approaches. She is the principal investigator for the MUSE Atlas of Disks (MAD) on the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory.

Carollo was appointed by NASA to the Science Oversight Committee of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope during the final servicing mission in 2009.