Serena's Home Page

About Me

I am a second year PhD student in the Cambridge University Engineering Department supervised by Prof. John Robertson. Currently I'm working in the Department of Material Science and Engineering in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My boss is the wonderful Prof. Stephanie Reich and I share my office with Ermin Malic. We study Carbon Nanotubes.

I come from Bisceglie, a town in the amazing Puglia (Italy). I did my undergraduate in the Physics Department of the University of Bari. I specialised in Spectrocopy, Quantum Optics and Optoelectronics, but then I changed to ab-initio simulations. I use the Siesta and the Transiesta code to calculate electronic and quantum transport properties of Carbon Nanotubes.

Why this picture?

I was in my little town Italy with my boyfriend, Olly, and we boarded on a train to go to Rome. We suddenly realised it was the wrong train (because in my little town they don't announce trains) and it just started moving, so we thought we would have been fine... we opened the door and jumped off! I managed to break my shin bone and fibula, while Olly didn't break anything, which means that I'm incompetent at jumping off moving trains (some picts). I got an operation, and I have a fancy intramedullary T2 titanium nail inside my shin bone. I don't trigger metal detectors, which became my deepest concern for a while. The peculiar shaft fracture and the ability of my doctors and physiotherapist led me back to walk in less than two months. The picture at the left is me 10 weeks after my operation hanging upside down from an indoor swing. I was somehow determined to go back to reality as soon as possible. My reality is clearly upside down. The photo was taken at the end of a wonderful weekend at Olly's cottage (Glen Cottage) in Devonshire.

My Geek Code

As a proper geek the fisrt thing to do is get your own Geek Code to communicate to other geeks outside there what are you geek about.


-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- 
    Version: 3.1
    GS/L/FA !d s---:+ a- C++>$ UL++>$ P+ L+++ E--- W++(--) N+ o K- w
    O? M+ V-- PS++>$ PE-- Y+ PGP+ t+ 5? X++ R* !tv b++ DI+++ D
    G+ e+++ h* r++ x++**
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------