Alain J. Corso graduated with honors in Electronic Engineering from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2010. In 2014, he obtained his Ph.D. in Space Science and Technology from the same university. Currently, he is a researcher at the National Research Council of Italy – Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnology. He is also a contract professor of Physics (since 2022) and Applied Optics (since 2018) at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova. Since 2018 he has been a member of the committee of the Ph.D. school in “Sciences, Technologies, and Measurements for Space” (STMS) in which he teaches a module of the course “Space Optics and detectors”.

His primary research interests revolve around the design, development, and modeling of optical space instrumentation and components for space applications, with a specific focus on instrumentation for UV (Ultraviolet) and EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) astronomy. He is a co-investigator for the PHEBUS spectrometer on the ESA BepiColombo mission and an associated scientist for the METIS coronagraph on the ESA Solar Orbiter mission. He is also involved in the Italian team participating in the NASA mission MUSE.

He also has expertise in the field of development, deposition, and characterization of nanostructured thin films, specifically for optical and sensor applications. He has contributed to the development of optical transducers based on nanostructured thin films for the detection of hydrogen; he has also worked on the development of sensors for measuring changes in refractive index utilizing surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technology. Currently, he deals with the study of degradation mechanisms on thin films subjected to irradiation with gamma rays and low-energy ions.