Lorenzo Sironi

Lorenzo Sironi is an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University, where he works on a variety of plasma processes relevant to astronomy. He became passionate about astronomy in Pisa, before moving to the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton for his PhD, awarded in 2011. Since then, he has been a NASA Einstein Fellow at Harvard, and he moved to Columbia in 2016, where he has nurtured a dynamic research group in high-energy plasma astrophysics. He was awarded the 2019 Sloan Fellowship in Physics and the 2020 Cottrell Scholar Award. His research group investigates the plasma physics of shocks, magnetic reconnection and turbulence in order to explain from first principles the observations of a wide variety of astrophysical sources.

Research Topics

high energy astrophysics and plasma astrophysics; particle acceleration and nonthermal emission from shocks and magnetic reconnection; cosmic rays