Dr. Alessia Franchini was a Postdoctoral Scholar at UNLV for two years working with Prof. Rebecca Martin as well as Prof. Steve Lubow at Space Telescope Science Institute on dynamics of protoplanetary disks in binary systems. She used a combination of analytical models and hydrodynamical simulations to investigate the interaction between gaseous disks and planets in binary stars. During her time at UNLV, she also worked with Prof. Martin on the transients Be/X-ray binaries and developed models that can reproduce and explain the observed outbursts in these systems.
She is now a Research Fellow at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca in Italy, where she works mostly on the massive black hole binary evolution in gaseous environments, using primarily hydrodynamical simulations.