LUIGI
TOFFOLATTI BALLARIN

I was born in Pieve di Soligo (Treviso), a little town in the region of Veneto, in northern Italy, in 1960. I got my High School degree in 1979 and then I went to the University of Padova to study the Master Degree in Astronomy. After completing my Master studies I got my PhD title in 1990, with the PhD thesis "L'evoluzione cosmologica delle sorgenti extragalattiche e i fondi cosmici nelle bande del radio e dell'Infrarosso", under the supervision of Proff. Luigi Danese e Gianfranco De Zotti. During the summer of 1990 I spent three very fruitful months as Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) of the University of Cambridge (UK), under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Fabian. In october 1990 I got a Post-Doc position at the Departamento de Física Moderna of the University of Cantabria (Santander, Spain), where I worked until the end of 1991 in collaboration with Prof. Xavier Barcons. In September 1991 I got a "Research staff position" - as a Researcher in Astronomy - at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova (Padova, Italy) where I worked in collaboration with Proff. Luigi Danese and Gianfranco De Zotti, my PhD Thesis advisors and with Prof. Alberto Franceschini. After spending a few years as Visiting Professor, at first, and, then, as Associate Professor at the Departamento de Física of the University of Oviedo (Asturias, Spain), in July 1999 I won a permament position of Senior Lecturer ("Profesor Titular" de Universidad) at the same University. In december 2017 I won a position of Full Professor at the Department of Physics of the University of Oviedo (Spain). Moreover, I have been a member of the "Planck Collaboration" - from 1996 up to 2021 - and, in 2006, I have been selected as "Planck Scientist" by the Planck Science Team (ST). The "Planck Collaboration" designed, developed and constructed the European Space Agency (ESA) "Planck" satellite (http://www.cosmos.esa.int/Planck), launched from Kouru (French Guyana) in May 2009 and whose operations ended in October 2013. The "Planck Collaboration" has published more than 150 scientific articles in the international journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (EDP Sciences; Impact Factor: 6.5). These articles have already collectively obtained more than 55000 (ISI-WoS) and more than 80000 (NASA/ADS: Astronomy Data System at the Harvard University) citations in scientific refereed journals. In this set of articles all the most relevant astrophysical as well as cosmological results obtained by the analysis of the "Planck" full-sky Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy maps - in temperature and in polarization - are presented and discussed. By these full-sky CMB maps the "Planck" mission has provided not only the most precise values of the cosmological parameters ever, but also the most precise picture of the early Universe to date and has given a fundamental contribution to a better understanding of the standard (Lambda-CDM) model of the Universe. As a member of the Planck Collaboration, I have been awarded the Gruber Prize for Cosmology in 2018 and the Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize of the European Physical Society in 2019. I am a co-author of more than 210 articles published in peer-reviewed international scientific journals (with a total of more than 85000 citations in NASA/ADS) and more than 200 of them published in JCR-Q1 journals. I am also a co-author of three book chapters and, in the last 25 years, I have participated in many differente activities for the popularization of Astronomy, Astrophysics and of Science, more in general. My last values, as for July 2025, of the Hirsch-index are: H=93 (ISI-WoS) and H=105 (ADS).