Marco Pierbattista

Where I come from

About myself

As long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by why things are the way they appear. A restless curiosity has always accompanied me, pushing me to look beyond surfaces and search for deeper explanations of what I perceived. Growing up in an isolated house in the countryside offered me the rare opportunity to experience nature almost as a pioneer: tasting grass out of curiosity, observing the intricate organization of insect colonies, studying the structure of leaves, and recognizing the seasonal return of constellations against a perfectly dark sky.

I was almost eleven when I asked my parents for a telescope. By then, astronomy had already become a quiet obsession. I devoured books and magazines, and my mother fed this passion by buying me a monthly astronomy magazine and VHS tapes explaining the most fascinating astronomical phenomena. When the telescope finally arrived, it felt as though it had always been there. I began to discover the universe firsthand: the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn’s rings and moons. I would wake up at five in the morning to observe Venus, carefully recording every detail of my observations in a notebook. I learned that Jupiter has more than four satellites, observed the red surface of Mars, the bright clouds of Venus, the green flash at sunrise, and the craters of the Moon. Long before I knew what a scientist was, I was already behaving like one.

This passion for science—particularly astronomy—guided the most important steps of my life and carried me across the world. I graduated in Astronomy at the University of Bologna and then moved to Sardinia to work on my master’s thesis on pulsars. After defending it in December 2006, I relocated to Paris in February 2007, where a few months later I began a PhD in Pulsar Astrophysics. I defended my PhD in December 2010 and remained in Paris for some time, before moving to Milan for a postdoctoral position. From there, my path led me to Poland—first to Toruń and then to Lublin—for further postdoctoral appointments. It was in Poland that I came to an important realization: being a scientist does not necessarily mean being a researcher.

Throughout my research career, I had the privilege of working with and learning from exceptional scientists in many parts of the world. I traveled extensively—across the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, Namibia, and almost every European country. I lived in many cities and met an extraordinary number of remarkable people. Along the way, I experienced firsthand how the passion for science and the impulse to explore the world are among the most fundamental human instincts, driving progress forward.

In Warsaw, I made a decisive change: I left academic research and joined industry as a Data Scientist at Accenture. Poland became my home for seven years. There, I married my wife Patrycja, and together we adopted our dog, Frania. In 2021, we decided to begin a new chapter and relocate to Switzerland.

When I look back at my past, I see nothing other than a continuous thread leading to who I am today. I still approach the world with the same curiosity, the same desire to learn, to discover, to understand, and to travel—wherever that may lead next. I am still a scientist, and I am still, in many ways, discovering what a scientist truly is.