Nicolò Belgiovine
Nicolò studied Astronomy at the Università of Padova, Italy. During his last year of bachelor he focused on the hierarchical formation of intermediate mass black holes in globular clusters. He graduated in Astrophysics and Cosmology in 2025 at the same university. During his master’s degree he developed an interest in accretion phenomena through X-ray observations that led him to take part in an exchange program at the University of Groningen where he wrote his thesis on the variability and phase-lags of X-ray photons in the low-mass X-ray binary system XTE J15150-564.
Key interests: X-ray, AGN, high energy astrophysics, accretion processes, time and phase lags.
Natale De Bonis
Natale studied at the University of Naples Federico II, where he obtained both his Bachelor’s in 2022 and his Master’s Degree in Physics in 2024. His Master’s research was a study on the co-evolution of AGN and their host galaxies in the HYPER-MAX fields J231 and J1342. After completing his master, he started working at Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte (OACN) in Naples on anomaly detection in AGN time series through machine learning.
Key-interest: AGN, galaxy evolution, accretion process, machine learning
Amie Louise Doherty
Amie-Louise Doherty recently completed an Integrated Master’s degree in Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh. Her undergraduate dissertation explored the chemical enrichment of the first galaxies using cosmological simulations. As a trainee at ESA, she investigated winds in high-mass X-ray binaries with XMM-Newton, which motivated her subsequent master’s research. Her thesis focused on AGN, using XMM-Newton spectroscopy and Bayesian methods to study black-hole driven winds and outflows.
Prathamesh Ingale
Prathamesh Ingale received his Bachelor’s degree in Science in 2022 from Fergusson College (Autonomous college under Pune University), Pune, India. During his undergraduate studies, he worked with the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) collaboration on his bachelor’s project, which focused on obtaining dispersion measure time series of pulsars using uGMRT data. He then moved to Germany to pursue a Master’s in Astrophysics at the University of Bonn, which he completed in July 2025. For his Master’s thesis, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), focusing on the jet precession and variability of M81* using VLBI and Effelsberg observations.
Marios Kouzis
Marios earned his B.Sc. in Physics (2023) and M.Sc. in Astrophysics (2025) from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. During his final undergraduate semester, he completed an internship at the National Observatory of Athens, investigating the presence of X-ray AGN in high-redshift galaxy clusters. As a Master’s student, he joined the ASTRAPE project, which focuses on super-Eddington accretion in compact objects. His thesis research centered on major outbursts of Be/X-ray binaries in the Magellanic Clouds, using NuSTAR observations, physically motivated spectral models, and parameter estimation techniques to study accretion column emission in the super-Eddington regime.
Key interests: accretion processes, X-ray data analysis, AGN, X-ray binaries
Tianying Lian
Tianying Lian received her Bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics from Shandong University (China) in 2022. During her undergraduate studies, she investigated the multi-wavelength variability of the quasar 3C 273, which sparked her interest in black hole variability. She then joined the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), where she earned her Master’s degree in Astrophysics in 2025. As a master’s student, she contributed to the Einstein Probe mission, performing duty work to search for X-ray transients and conducting collaborative analyses of selected events. Her master’s thesis focused on a systematic search for AGN X-ray eclipse events using long-term Swift observations.
Key interests: X-ray astronomy, transients, AGN, accretion processes, machine learning.
Vicente Madurga Favieres
Vicente Madurga Favieres obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Physics and his Master’s degree in Astrophysics from Complutense University of Madrid. His master’s thesis “Pulse-to-pulse variations in the accreting X-ray pulsar Vela X-1” at ESA/ESAC was supervised by Dr. Peter Kretschmar and Dr. Antonio Martín-Carrillo. He found that these variations are caused by slight changes in the density of the accretion flow. Following this, he went to Dr. Karl Remeis Observatory (Germany) to work for 3 months on X-ray spectra of X-ray binaries (XRBs) with Dr. Joern Wilms. He then moved to NASA-GSFC (U.S.) for 1 year to study the narrow Fe K-alpha emission line in the spectra of XRBs and AGNs with Dr. Panayiotis Tzanavaris. In collaboration with other experts, he also explored how machine learning can further advance such analysis. His PhD at the University of Rome Tor Vergata will be supervised by Dr. Francesco Tombesi.
Valerio Pandolfi
Valerio received both his Bachelor’s degree in Physics and his Master’s degree in Astrophysics from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. During his Master’s he collaborated with the IXPE group at the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology (INAF-IAPS) in Rome, to investigate polarization features in high mass X-ray binaries. Following this experience, Valerio spent two exchange semesters at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, where he completed his Master’s thesis research at the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IAAT), exploring the accretion geometry of the black hole X-ray binary GX 339-4 by perfoming spectroscopical analyses of relativistic reflection in the inner accretion flow.
Key interests: accretion processes, X-ray data analysis, AGN, machine learning, X-ray binaries
Michail Polioudakis
Michail completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Department of Physics, University of Crete, earning a B.Sc. in Physics in 2024 and an M.Sc. in Astrophysics and Space Physics in 2025. His undergraduate thesis focused on the temperature radial dependence of X-ray illuminated accretion discs in active galactic nuclei (AGN). Following this work, for his master’s thesis he investigated the multiwavelength (X-ray/UV/optical) variability of the Seyfert I galaxy Fairall 9 within the framework of the X-ray reverberation model, using observations from Swift
Key interests: AGN, cosmology, observational astrophysics, theoretical astrophysics, accretion processes
Shashanth Sriramanathan
Shashanth obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics from Azim Premji University (Bangalore, India) in 2023. Following this, he completed his master’s in astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam in 2025. Due to an interest in accretion physics and spectral timing techniques, Shashanth’s master’s thesis focused on studying Quasi-Periodic Oscillations (QPOs) in black hole X-ray binaries. He explored the feasibility of using the bispectrum to reconstruct QPO waveforms; specifically, he developed a technique to extract energy dependent QPO phase differences and applied this to NICER data of the low mass X-ray binary MAXI J1535-571.
Key interests: AGN, X-ray binaries, accretion processes, spectral
timing
Erin Umuzigazuba
Erin received her Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Astronomy from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Her Bachelor’s thesis focused on primordial black holes as a dark matter source in the Universe. She obtained her Master’s degree in Astronomy and Data Science from Leiden University, The Netherlands. In two Master’s projects, she researched the ejection of hypervelocity stars from intermediate mass black holes in star clusters and developed a machine learning algorithm that classifies the light curves of different types of supernovae that interact with a circumstellar medium.
