Alessandra Buonanno

Alessandra Buonanno is a theoretical physicist working in gravitational-wave physics and cosmology. She is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany, leading the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" division. She holds a College Park professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park in College Park, Maryland, and is a meber of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

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 and for pioneering work at the interface between analytical and numerical relativity to design waveform models for searches of gravitational waves from compact-object binaries, inferring astrophysical and fundamental physics information and testing General Relativity. She has also 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 has also studied physical mechanisms in the early Universe responsible for gravitational-wave emission.

Alessandra Buonanno earned her MSc and PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in Italy. After a brief period spent at the theory division of CERN, she held a postdoctoral position at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France and received the Tolman Prize Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology in the USA, where she has also been a visiting associate on several occasions between 2002 and 2014. She was a permanent 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 in 2005.

While at the University of Maryland, Buonanno has been a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She was the William and Flora Hewlett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is a Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, the American Physical Society, and is a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo in Canada. Her awards include the Lower Saxony State Award in 2016 (shared with Karsten Danzmann and Bruce Allen), the Special Breakthrough Prize and the Gruber Prize in 2016 (shared with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration), and the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation (SIGRAV) Prize in 2000.