Dr Lucia Marchetti has been elected as “Past President” or “Advisor” to the African Planetarium Association (APA) executive board. She is a senior lecturer in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Cape Town. She obtained her MSc in Astronomy in 2008 and her PhD in Astronomy in 2012 both from the University of Padova. Between 2012 and 2020 she has worked as Postdoc at the Open University in the UK and after at the University of Western Cape and University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on galaxy evolution, strong gravitational lensing studies and, more recently, on 3D Big Data visualisation techniques (she is the project manager of the IDIA visualisation Lab based at UCT.). She co-authored >80 refereed scientific publications with > 4300 citations in total (15 publications have more than 100 citations each) and has an h-index of 35. She is involved in a number of international scientific consortia, co-leading scientific and technical working groups. She is a member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), elected member of the IAU Division C – Commission C2 “Communicating Astronomy with the public”, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and member of the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP). She is very active in outreach and science education/communication activities, notably as UK STEM ambassador, as one of the UK National coordinators for the UNESCO celebrations of the International Year of Light (IYL, http://www.light2015.org/), Open University IYL project manager and Soapboscience SA coordinator.
