Team SKA
Dr Chiara Ferrari
Director, Maison SKA-France On 7 March 2022, the French national research agency CNRS signed a cooperation agreement with the SKAO, the result of years of work by the Maison SKA-France consortium led by Director Dr Chiara Ferrari. Only a month later, France is imminently (at the time of writing) due to sign the accession agreement which formally starts the process of becoming an SKAO member state following ratification of the Convention in the country. An active research scientist at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, Chiara is also chair of the European SKA Forum and an observer to the SKAO Council representing France. We caught up with her to discuss galaxy clusters, French enthusiasm for the SKA project, and how winter sunsets set her on the path to being an astronomer. A trip down memory lane first, Chiara – what was your childhood like? I grew up in a small Italian village (Coldirodi) close to the town of Sanremo and the border with France. Young Chiara was very different because I was very shy! I enjoyed reading and studying from a very young age, but I was not isolated, I had a lot of friends. Where do you trace your love of astronomy back to? My parents had a rose farm, where my older sister and I spent a lot of time. In the evening when we were leaving the
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farm to go home, the sunset colours and Venus were often amazingly beautiful, especially in winter. I always wanted to understand what was behind this beauty. It was really through reading that I developed a love for astronomy – I wasn’t on the terrace with a telescope. When I was around seven I asked my father to buy me a book, which I could not really understand (I wanted an advanced one, not just a book for children!), but I was always studying it, dreaming of the moment I would fully understand it.
BELOW: Chiara front and centre with childhood pals. “I was - and still am - so happy among friends,” she says.
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