Faculty Directory

Biography

Christian is a physics teacher and researcher. He has been teaching physics (and mathematics) at CCAC since 2014. Physics and teaching are his two main passions and he believes that teaching is one of the most important aspects of science as it shapes the next generation of scientist and researchers. He moved to the USA from Italy in 2009 and completed his undergraduate degree in mathematics and graduate degree in theoretical physics from the University of Pittsburgh.

Christian's area of research is in non-perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD for short). QCD is the theory of quarks, the most elementary constituents of matter, and gluons, the massless force carriers. Non-perturbative QCD is used to describe how these particles interact to build all baryons and mesons (collectively known as hadrons), such as protons, neutrons, pions etc. QCD is a rich theory and besides the conventional hadrons it also predicts the existence of exotic states. These are particles that contain one or more massive, constituent gluons. His main goal is to develop phenomenological models that can describe the mass spectrum, structure and decay modes of these yet-undiscovered hybrids.

As a graduate student, he was also involved in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, where he spent a year doing research in experimental particle physics.