Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
Fabio Bresolin was born and raised in Italy, in
the hilly countryside north
of Venice. His interest in the heavens started
when he was 10, and led him to obtain an undergraduate
degree in Astronomy at the University
of Padova. He then moved to the United States,
and received his Ph.D. at Steward
Observatory in Tucson, Arizona in 1997, working
on the ionized gaseous nebulae found in spiral galaxies.
During this time he also participated in the HST
Key Project on the Distance Scale, got married and
materialized his first child. He held postdoc positions
in Germany, first at the European
Southern Observatory near Munich, and then at
the Munich
University Observatory, from 1997 to 2001. Here
he started to work on the quantitative spectroscopic
analysis of extragalactic blue supergiant stars.
 With
a rather dramatic climatic change, he and his family
moved to Hawaii in 2001, where Fabio is currently
an Assistant Professor at the Institute
for Astronomy in Honolulu. He works on massive
stars and chemical abundances in galaxies. He is
involved with the Araucaria
Project, an international collaboration with
the aim of improving the calibration of stellar
distance indicators in galaxies, including blue
supergiants and Cepheid variables. He can occasionally
be spotted while observing galaxies atop Mauna Kea
or in the deserts of Chile. More often he can be
seen commuting on Kalaniana`ole highway on his white
Vespa scooter. As a new Hawaiian resident he sometimes
senses the unfairness of life, because, unlike his
three children, he does not like sand.
Fabio Bresolin's collaborators on this image of
NGC 300 are
Rolf-Peter Kudritzki (Institute for Astronomy,
University of Hawaii) and Wolfgang Gieren and Grzegorz
Pietrzynski (Universidad de Concepcion, Chile).
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