As a child growing up in Pisa, Italy, Giacomo Sommani was captivated by science and was obsessed with strange ideas, like colonizing Mars. His interest in science continued through high school, where he did well in science subjects. However, since he was also studying art and literature, he was faced with the dilemma of choosing between the arts and the sciences. Driven by his curiosity of the unknown, he ultimately decided to pursue science.
While Giacomo was an undergraduate student at the University of Pisa, he learned about IceCube and decided to move to Germany for his PhD. “I found astroparticle physics fascinating, with all of the crazy detectors being built to study these particles that we had no clue about because we never had accelerators capable of reaching similar energies.”
“Pick the subject that you find cool, not the one that pays the most.”
Giacomo Sommani
At Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Giacomo works on reconstructing the real-time alerts that IceCube sends out to the public within minutes of the detection of a likely astrophysical neutrino event. “Reconstruction is cool because you study properties of things like the glacial ice and see how it relates directly to the information that is important for drawing scientific conclusions.” He also calculates statistics for those same alerts and uses them in his search for possible neutrino sources.
During his free time, Giacomo enjoys performing in the theater and playing sports like swimming, running, and rowing. Although he is no longer scouting, he credits those days in Italy for shaping who he is today.
When asked what advice he has for future scientists, his answer was simple: “Pick the subject that you find cool, not the one that pays the most. If you go for it, you might discover a whole new world behind it.”