Alessandra Buonanno
Alessandra Buonanno is a theoretical physicist working in gravitational-wave physics and cosmology. She is the director of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" division of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam. She holds a College Park professorship at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.
Buonanno's research has focused on the analytical modeling of the dynamics and gravitational-wave emission from coalescing black holes, the interface between analytical and numerical relativity, and the search for gravitational waves with ground-based detectors, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), GEO600 and Virgo. She is most well known as co-developer (with Thibault Damour) of the effective one body (EOB) formalism. She has carried out research to design advanced optical configurations of laser interferometer gravitational-wave detectors that use the subtleties of quantum mechanics to gain even more sensitivity. She is also interested in studying physical mechanisms in the early Universe responsible for gravitational-wave emission.
Alessandra Buonanno earned her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in Italy. After a brief period spent at the theory division of CERN, she held postdoctoral positions at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France and at the California Institute of Technology in the USA. She was a staff researcher at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris (IAP) and Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC) in Paris with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) before joining the University of Maryland as a physics professor. While at the University of Maryland, Buonanno has been a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is a Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.