A former Presidential Young Investigator and Sloan Research Fellow, he is the author of six English books (and various foreign translations) and 230 refereed articles on theoretical astrophysics and cosmology.

In a career that has seen him publish 260 refereed research papers and seven books, Melia has made important contributions in High Energy Astronomy and the physics of supermassive black holes.

With his students and collaborators, he was the first to propose that imaging this object with millimeter-interferometry[1][2] would reveal the shape and size of the shadow predicted by general relativity, thereby providing empirical evidence for the validity of the Kerr metric.

Fulvio Melia's foundational work on this concept, and associated outreach through several books he has written on this topic, have led to the development of the Event Horizon Telescope, which today is poised to make a mm-wavelength image of this object as predicted almost two decades ago.

[citation needed] Its timeline has been confirmed by the discovery of high-redshift quasars, whose billion-solar-mass size is too large to accommodate within the compressed time scale of the standard model.