LANZA, Antonino Francesco

Dr. Antonino Francesco Lanza is a member of the International Astronomical Union and of the European Astronomical Society. He earned his PhD from the University of Catania in 1993 and in the same year was enrolled in the permanent staff of the Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, now a research institution belonging to the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). His current main field of study is the interaction between extrasolar planets and their host stars. He is also interested in the physical processes related to stellar rotation and magnetic fields in late-type stars both single and in close binary systems. He is one of the founders of the GAPS (Global Architecture of Planetary Systems) collaboration aimed at discovering new planetary systems and investigating their properties and evolution. He collaborated to the space mission CoRoT (as a Guest Investigator) and is involved in Gaia (as a member of the CU7 - Variability processing). He is presently working for the science management of PLATO, a recently approved ESA mission to discover exoplanets and study their evolution with the most advanced methods of Astrophysics.