I am an astrophysicist studying some of the most fascinating beasts of the Universe: supermassive black holes. These objects are found at the center of most galaxies and, when they accrete, can become the brightest persistent sources of radiation in the Cosmos. Supermassive black holes are also believed to play an important role in the life of their host galaxies, and might therefore help us to understand how galaxies evolve through Cosmic time.

I am an Associate Professor at the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísico of the Universidad Diego Portales, in Santiago, Chile. I am a member of the AAS editorial board, where I serve as scientific editor for the AAS journals (i.e. ApJ, ApJL and ApJS).
I am also a long-term visiting professor at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, in China, and an affiliated faculty at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of George Mason University, Fairfax, USA.
 

At UDP I am leading the High-Energy Research on Obscuration and Emission 
in Supermassive black holes (HEROES) team. Here is a recent picture of most of the team (missing: Ruancun Li, Jeffrey McKaig and Arghajit Jana) taken after KritiGupta's graduation.










 

 

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My research is focussed on the structure and evolution of the material around supermassive black holes, combining X-ray spectroscopy with multi-wavelength observations. I am one of the co-founders of the Swift/BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS), and a member of the science team of the hard X-ray NASA mission NuSTAR. I am also very interested in extreme AGN variability, particularly from the X-ray perspective.

I moved to Santiago in February 2015, after spending two years at the Department of Astronomy of Kyoto University, in Japan, as a JSPS fellow. At Kyoto University I was involved in the preparation for the Japanese-led X-ray satellite ASTRO-H.

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I obtained my PhD in December 2011, the title of my PhD dissertation was Active Galactic Nuclei at hard X-rays: Absorption, Reflection and the Unified Model. My PhD work was carried out at the Data Centre for Astrophysics (ISDC), part of the Department of Astronomy of the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. 

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My mail address: claudio.ricci.astro@gmail.com