Rate My Professor Michele Cappellari

Professor Michele Cappellari is the Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. He obtained his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Padova. His professional career includes a VENI Fellowship awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research at Leiden University, an Advanced Fellowship from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society, all at the University of Oxford, culminating in his current professorial position.

Cappellari's research focuses on unraveling the assembly and evolutionary history of galaxies through two complementary observational strategies: high-resolution studies of nearby galaxies that preserve the fossil record of their formation and evolution, and observations of distant galaxies that capture their appearance billions of years ago. He has played a pivotal role in pioneering integral-field spectroscopy (IFS) techniques and projects, including the ATLAS^3D survey, the SAURON instrument team, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's MaNGA collaboration, and the HARMONI instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope. His investigations extend to the interplay between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, dark matter distributions within galaxies, and cosmological studies through the TDCOSMO team, which combines gravitational lensing with stellar dynamical modeling. Cappellari has developed widely adopted open-source software packages that have transformed galaxy dynamics research, such as pPXF for penalized pixel-fitting of stellar kinematics and populations, JAM for Jeans Anisotropic Modelling of galaxy dynamics, MGEfit for multi-Gaussian expansion photometric decompositions, PowerBin for adaptive Voronoi binning, CapFit for constrained nonlinear least-squares fitting, PaFit for kinematic position-angle modeling, and others including LOESS smoothing and AdaMet for Bayesian analysis. His contributions are recognized through the Tartufari International Prize for Astronomy from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for advancing galaxy structure knowledge via IFS, inclusion among Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers for producing top 1% cited papers, and a Group Award from the Royal Astronomical Society to the SAURON team. Notable publications include a review on the structure and evolution of galaxies (2016), an encyclopedia chapter on early-type galaxies (2026), and a Nature article elucidating the link between supermassive black hole and host galaxy evolution (2012).