Daniele received his B.S. in Physics and M.S. in Astrophysics from the University of Milan-Bicocca in 2011 and 2014, respectively. Both his bachelor and master thesis focused on the characterisation of the X-ray afterglow of bright gamma-rays bursts. Between 2014-2015, he taught Maths and Physics in a scientific high school in Italy. Thereafter, he pursued a Ph.d in Astrophysics at the Netherlands institute for space research (SRON) and at the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Dr Elisa Costantini.

Daniele’s research has concentrated on the absorption and the scattering of X-ray radiation by interstellar dust. Together with his research group, he built the first X-ray extinction model of interstellar dust based on newly acquired synchrotron measurements for a sample of dust analogues. As part of his graduate studies, he also investigated the hot phase of the interstellar medium, analysing the high-ionisation absorption lines detected in the spectra of luminous Galactic X-ray binary. He graduated in March 2020, one week before the lockdown.

During the pandemic, he developed together with Dr Missagh Mehdipour, a time-dependent photoionisation model which enables to estimate the evolution of ion concentrations and spectrum of a plasma in non-equilibrium ionisation (such as a warm absorber close to a variable AGN).

Daniele joined the Chandra/HETG team at MIT in October 2020, under the supervision of Dr David Huenemoerder.