Prof. Vitale was born in the south of Italy, where “at the age of 10 or 11 I discovered I wanted to be a scientist, and never changed my mind afterward”. He obtained his bachelor and master degrees in physics at the University of Bologna, and his phD in physics at the Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris, in 2010. He was a postdoctoral associate at the Nikhef of Amsterdam and a postdoctoral associate and a research scientist at the MIT LIGO Lab before joining the MIT faculty in 2017.

The work of Professor Vitale covers several aspects of the new field of gravitational wave. He is interested in the characterization of compact objects, and their formation channels, as well as in the possibility of using gravitational waves to perform strong-field tests of general relativity. He has been deeply involved with the analysis of the first two sources discovered by LIGO. At the MIT, he has developed a low-latency search for unmodeled signals, which is one of the two algorithms that discovered the first-ever gravitational wave signal. More recently, he has been investigating the possibilities of the proposed next generation of gravitational-wave observatories. Besides science, Salvo enjoys reading, history, literature, movies, walking through the city (especially Paris), opera, basketball, making bread (and eating it!).