Biography

Alessandra Buonanno received her Ph.D. from the University of Pisa, followed by a postdoctoral work at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France and a Richard C. Tolman Postdoctoral Prize fellowship at Caltech. Returning to France, she worked for CNRS at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie in Paris before accepting a faculty position at UMD in 2005. She received a Sloan Fellowship in 2006 and she was the William and Flora Hewlett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2011-2012. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation, and a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute. In 2014, she accepted the position of Director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam; she remains a Research Professor at UMD. Her work spans several topics in gravitational physics, in particular theoretical and phenomenological aspects of gravitational-wave physics and astrophysics.