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. Her research has suggested the independent formation of stars in the bulge, rather than migration of stars from the galactic disk to its bulge.[2]