Dr. Davide Massari's research focuses on the formation and evolution of the Milky Way using stars and star clusters as tracers. Recently, he has been one of the main contributors to the revolution in this field, triggered by the Gaia mission, as he has observationally discovered the "Kraken" merging event (Massari et al. 2019) and contributed to the discovery of Gaia-Enceladus (Helmi et al. 2018, Nature) and the Thamnos accretion events. His experience has given him the positions of co-IP of the 4DWARFS survey within the 4MOST collaboration, globular cluster team leader for the Euclid mission, and roles of scientific and technical responsibility (as an astrometric expert) within the ELT, Gaia, MAVIS, Vera Rubin-LSST and WEAVE projects.

According to the latest internal survey, the average h-index among the entire Italian INAF community is 29. Dr Massari has reached an h-index value of 36 only 2 years after getting a permanent position, which he obtained as the youngest winner of the national competition held in 2020. His most important publication (Massari et al. 2019), which revealed the origin of the Milky Way globular cluster system and led to the observational discovery of the Kraken merger event, has collected 235 citations since 2019. This places this article in the top 100 most cited astronomical articles out of the 29341 published in 2019. He also led a highly influential paper in Nature Astronomy (Massari et al. 2018) that presents the first internal measurements of proper motion ever obtained in a dwarf galaxy dominated by dark matter. In summary, Dr. Massari led 17 refereed publications (6 of which received an international press release) and contributed to 64 other publications as co-author, compiling an outstanding total of 13765 citations to date.

Dr. Massari has given several review lectures and invited talks at international events and has been selected by the respective scientific committees to give talks at 23 other international events. He has been awarded the Berkeley 2022 award as a member of the Gaia collaboration. He has been awarded a total of 565 hours of telescope time in open competitive calls from major international ground-based and space-based telescope facilities.