Dr. Marcel Popescu is a scientific researcher II at
the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy (AIRA). Since 2011, he co-authored a total of 50
scientific articles (counting only ISI articles with impact factor greater than 1.5) in astrometry, spectroscopy,dynamical and compositional modeling of Solar System bodies. For this list of publications Scopus finds a h-index of 12 and outlines more than 500 citations. Dr. Popescu is also refereeing articles for the major scientific journals, Science, MNRAS, A&A Icarus, etc. He was the principal investigator for two projects financed by UEFISCDI with a budget of 210 000 euros. He is currently involved into international planetary science research programs on the following topics, “Near-infrared colors of minor planets recovered from VISTA-VHS survey (MOVIS)” (he is leading this program), “Science with OSIRIS-Rex and Hayabusa 2”, “Solar System science with ESA Euclid mission”, “Spectro-photometric characterization of near-Earth asteroids at the Canary Islands Observatories” (he is co-leading this program). He is member in the Working Group 2 – “Remote Observations”, and Working Group 4 – “Data analysis” (he is co-leading the compositional and space weathering characterization tasks) for the ESA Hera mission. He is also member of the H2020 NEOROCKS project He is one of the key members in the EURONEAR network (he joined in 2009). Dr Popescu has also a senior engineer level in the industry. He worked as system engineer, as software engineer and as product engineer for three multinational companies (Atmel, Exaqtworld, and Infineon).