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About

D. Pollacco is a prominent observational astronomer whose career has been defined by the design and leadership of large-scale, robotic sky surveys targeting exoplanets and transient astronomical phenomena. His foundational contributions to the SuperWASP project — beginning with its construction in 2002 and expanding to a twin-hemisphere network by 2008 — established one of the most productive ground-based exoplanet transit survey programs ever undertaken, monitoring hundreds of thousands of stars for planetary signatures. Building on this legacy, Pollacco contributed to the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), a precision facility at ESO's Paranal Observatory engineered to detect sub-Neptune and super-Earth sized worlds around bright stars (46 citations), and collaborated on the Qatar Exoplanet Survey targeting hot Jupiters and smaller planets (26 citations). His scientific vision has since extended beyond exoplanets into multi-messenger astronomy: Pollacco has been a driving force behind the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO), a robotic wide-field network now fully operational and dedicated to identifying the optical counterparts of gravitational-wave events (19 citations). Across these endeavors, his work has shaped how the community builds and operates robotic survey infrastructure, leaving an enduring imprint on time-domain and exoplanet astronomy.