User:Janeender/Tarek Hassan

Tarek Hassan is a Spanish/Lebanese astrophysicist whose work focuses on high energy telescopes which rely on Cherenkov radiation. He has participated in the largest international telescope consortiums of this kind, including CTA, MAGIC and VERITAS. He is the recipient of a ERC Grant of 2.5M€ with the MicroStars project, to design and implement novel uses of Cherenkov telescopes.

Education & career
He studied Physics in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), later specializing in astrophysics through a joint masters between UCM and the Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). In 2010, he was selected as trainee in the European Space Astronomy Centre, ESA's centre for space science. Later, the Spanish Ministry of Science awarded him a PhD scholarship, with which he started his research on the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), joining its international consortium.

In 2015, after his PhD, he was awarded a Juan de la Cierva scholarship to research at IFAE (Barcelona), where he joined the MAGIC telescope consortium. In 2017, he obtained a position at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (Germany), joining the Arizona-based VERITAS telescope consortium. In 2020, he was awarded a Madrid Region talent contract to research at the CIEMAT centre, which had a central role in the design and construction of CTA components.

He belongs to the PhD supervision program at UCM, and as a software developer he has contributed to several CTA-related projects.

Work
Hassan has published high impact research in Nature and Science journals, concerning VERITAS and MAGIC  telescopes. He has an H-index of 32 according to Google Scholar. His research has been featured multiple times in scientific   and mainstream media,   which has featured his work as "clever", "excellent", or "great achievement".

In 2022, he obtained a European Research Council Starting Grant of 2.5 million euro to design and implement novel modifications on CTA. The project is expected to enable "the first telescope with an equivalent size of several kilometers of diameter". This project was highlighted in the media as "difficult to ask more from an astronomy project", "virtual supertelescope", "helpful to understand the morphology of stars", and "a project to revolutionize how we understand the solar system".

Selected works

 * Acciari, V. A., Ansoldi, S., Antonelli, L. A., Arbet Engels, A., Artero, M., Asano, K., ... & Pihet, M. (2022). Proton acceleration in thermonuclear nova explosions revealed by gamma rays. Nature Astronomy, 6(6), 689-697.
 * Abeysekara, A. U., Benbow, W., Brill, A., Buckley, J. H., Christiansen, J. L., Chromey, A. J., ... & Williamson, T. J. (2020). Demonstration of stellar intensity interferometry with the four VERITAS telescopes. Nature Astronomy, 4(12), 1164-1169.
 * Benbow, W., Bird, R., Brill, A., Brose, R., Chromey, A. J., Daniel, M. K., ... & Williamson, T. J. (2019). Direct measurement of stellar angular diameters by the VERITAS Cherenkov telescopes. Nature Astronomy, 3(6), 511-516.
 * Nigro, C., Deil, C., Zanin, R., Hassan, T., King, J., Ruiz, J. E., ... & Sinha, A. (2019). Towards open and reproducible multi-instrument analysis in gamma-ray astronomy. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 625, A10.
 * IceCube Collaboration, MAGIC, AGILE, ASAS-SN, HAWC, HESS, ... & Kappesser, D. (2018). Multimessenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A. Science, 361(6398), eaat1378.
 * Hassan, T., Arrabito, L., Bernlöhr, K., Bregeon, J., Cortina, J., Cumani, P., ... & Wood, M. (2017). Monte Carlo performance studies for the site selection of the Cherenkov Telescope Array. Astroparticle Physics, 93, 76-85.