Manuela Zoccali is an Italian astronomer who works in Chile as a professor of astrophysics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, and is the former director of the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics at the university.
[1] Her research concerns the metallicity of stars, particularly those in the galactic bulge of the Milky Way, and the implications of these observations for the evolution of both individual stars and the formation of the bulge.
[2] Zoccali is originally from Reggio Calabria in southern Italy.
[3] She was a student of astronomy at the University of Padua, where she earned a laurea in 1995, with undergraduate research on globular cluster NGC 1261,[1] and completed her Ph.D. in 2000.
Her doctoral dissertation concerned low-mass stars, and was supervised by Giampaolo Piotto.