Michele Limon is an Italian research associate and assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at Columbia University in the City of New York. Dr. Limon studied physics at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy and completed his post-doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been conducting research for more than 20 years and has experience in the design of ground, balloon and space-based instrumentation. His academic specialties include Astrophysics, Cosmology, Instrumentation Development, and Cryogenics.
As a research scientist at Princeton University from 1996-2001, Dr. Limon worked on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) project with NASA. WMAP is a NASA Explorer mission that launched June 2001 to make fundamental measurements of cosmology-the study of the properties of the universe as a whole. WMAP was extremely successful, producing the new Standard Model of Cosmology. For his work on WMAP, Dr. Limon and his team received the 2012 Gruber Yale Cosmology Prize.
Currently, Dr. Limon is a research associate and professor at Columbia University. At Columbia, he began work on EBEX, a balloon-borne microwave telescope designed to measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background. It collected data during an 11-day science flight over Antarctica. Measurements of the polarization of the CMB could probe an inflationary epoch that took place shortly after the big bang and significantly improve constraints on the values of several cosmological parameters. EBEX will also provide critical information about the level of polarized Galactic dust which will be necessary for all future CMB polarization experiments. In October 2014, Dr. Limon was awarded the Thomson Reuter prize of Highly Cited Researcher; this prize recognizes researchers that are in the top 1% of most cited scientists.