Nationality Italian
American Fields Astrophysics | Name Fulvio Melia Doctoral advisor Saul Rappaport Role Author | |
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Born 2 August 1956 (age 67)
Gorizia, Italy ( 1956-08-02 ) Alma mater Melbourne University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Doctoral students Marco Fatuzzo
Ranjeev Misra
Peter Tamblyn
Marcus Boyd
Jack Hall
Sergei Nayakshin
Robert Coker
Sera Markoff
Michael Fromerth
Siming Liu
Gabriel Rockefeller
Brandon Wolfe
Jun-Jie Wei
Thomas McClintock Known for High Energy Astronomy, supermassive black holes, cosmology Notable awards Presidential Young Investigator Award (from President Ronald Reagan), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, Sir Thomas Lyle Fellow, Miegunyah Fellow, Erskine Fellow, John Woodruff Simpson Chair Education University of Melbourne, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Books Cracking the Einstein, The Black Hole at the Center of, The Edge of Infinity: Superma, The Galactic Superma, Electrodynamics | ||
Residence United States of America Institutions University of Arizona | ||
Zero Active Mass in FRW Cosmologies
Fulvio Melia (born 2 August 1956) is an Italian-American astrophysicist, cosmologist and author. He is professor of physics, astronomy and the applied math program at the University of Arizona and was a scientific editor of The Astrophysical Journal and an associate editor of the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. A former Presidential Young Investigator and Sloan Research Fellow, he is the author of six English books (and various foreign translations) and 210 refereed articles on theoretical astrophysics and cosmology.
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Career
Melia was born in Gorizia, Italy. He was educated at Melbourne University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and held a post-doctoral research position at the University of Chicago, before taking an assistant professorship at Northwestern University in 1987. Moving to the University of Arizona as an associate professor in 1991, he became a full professor in 1993. From 1988 to 1995, he was a Presidential Young Investigator (under President Ronald Reagan), and then an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1989 to 1992. He became a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. He is also a professorial fellow in the School of Physics, Melbourne University, and a distinguished visiting professor at Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China.
From 1996 to 2002, he was a scientific editor with the Astrophysical Journal, and has later been an associate editor with The Astrophysical Journal Letters. He is also the chief editor of the Theoretical Astrophysics series of books at the University of Chicago Press.
In a career that has seen him publish 230 refereed research papers and six books, Melia has made important contributions in High Energy Astronomy and the physics of supermassive black holes. He is especially known for his work on the galactic center, particularly developing a theoretical understanding of the central supermassive black hole, known as Sagittarius A*. With his students and collaborators, he was the first to propose that imaging this object with millimeter-interferometry would reveal the shape and size of the shadow predicted by general relativity, thereby providing empirical evidence for the validity of the Kerr metric. Fulvio Melia's foundational work on this concept, and associated outreach through several books he has written on this topic, have led to the development of the Event Horizon Telescope, which today is poised to make a mm-wavelength image of this object as predicted almost two decades ago.
Melia and his students have developed the so-called R_h=ct Universe, a cosmological theory that, they argue, has accounted for the observational data better than all other models proposed thus far. In this cosmology, the Universe has no horizon problem, and therefore evolved without inflation.
He is a publicist of astronomy and science in general, delivering lectures at public venues, including museums and planetariums. His books have won several awards of distinction, including the designation of Outstanding Academic Books by the American Library Association, and selection as worldwide astronomy books of the year by Astronomy magazine.