About Me
Nice to meet you! My name is Lea Marcotulli
and I am a high energy astrophysicist and my main research focus is chasing
supermassive black holes at the dawn of the Universe that power relativistic
jets.
Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University
and a visiting postdoc in the
High Energy group at Caltech.
In September 2025, I will start my Helmholtz Investigator Group in the
gamma-ray group at DESY,
Zeuthen.
Stay tuned for any job opportunities to come work with me!
I pursued my undergraduate degree in Astronomy at Bologna University.
In 2015 I joined the graduate program at Clemson University where
I completed my `Masters en route' in 2017 and I finished my PhD in Physics in May 2021,
under Dr. Marco Ajello’s supervision.
From September 2021 until August 2024, I held the
NASA Einstein Postdoctoral
Fellowship which I brought to Yale University.
I use both NASA satellites in space that explore the universe at the highest X- and
gamma-ray energies, as well ground-based infrared and optical facilities, to find and
study the most powerful, most distant of these sources. Among the questions I
am trying to answer: how did these black grow so big so early on?
How did they evolve, from then to us? What is
the process of triggering these extreme relativistic jets from their cores?
When I am not staring into my laptop screen, or more poetically looking at the stars, you can find me in nature, hiking,
chopping wood, or camping. I love reading and knitting. But most importantly,
I have a passion for sharing my love for astrophysics with the world!