The next RED School will be March 16-22, 2025
Discover the school program and apply
Here’s the team of teachers in charge of this year’s courses, with whom you’ll have the opportunity to interact
Planet formation, geochemistry, cosmochemistry
Alessandro Morbidelli received the Master in Physics at the University of Milan (Italy) in 1988, and the Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Namur (Belgium) in 1991. In 1993 he obtained a CNRS permanent position at the observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice and in 2023 he has been elected Professor at Collège de France in Paris, the most ancient and prestigious French academic institution, with a chair on planet formation. He is an expert of the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems. He has extensively studied the formation and evolution of our Solar system. In 2005, with three other colleagues all gathered in Nice, he published a trilogy of papers in Nature, proposing the so-called Nice model, that reconstructs the evolution of the outer solar system after the removal of gas from the disk. He also studied several other aspects of the formation of planetary systems: giant planet formation and orbital migration, the effect of giant planets on the circulation of dust in the disk, planetesimal formation, super-Earth formation etc. Morbidelli has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Urey prize of the DPS in 2000 and the bronze and silver medal of CNRS in 1995 and 2019. In 2021 he has received an advanced grant from the European Research Council to build a new coherent model of terrestrial planet formation in the next 5 years. Also in 2021, he has become editor in chief of the journal Icarus, a planetary science journal started in 1968 by C. Sagan. He is the head of the planetary science division of the french space agency CNES.