Alessandra Buonanno

Alessandra Buonanno (born 1968) is an Italian-American theoretical physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam.

She is the head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department.

She holds a research professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park, and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Potsdam.

Buonanno earned her MSc in 1993, and she completed her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in 1996.

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 the R.C. Tolman Prize Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology.

Buonanno became a permanent researcher (Chargée de 1ere classe, CR1) in 2001 at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) and then at the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory (APC) in Paris with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) before joining the University of Maryland as a physics professor in 2005.

Buonanno was a Kavli Fellow at the Kavli Frontiers of Science Japanese-American Symposium of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007.

She was the William and Flora Hewlett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, from 2011 to 2012.

She moved to the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in 2014.

She was a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute from 2014 to 2020.

Buonanno's work with Thibault Damour of reducing the two-body problem in general relativity to an effective one-body formalism, and her research at the intersection of analytical-relativity modeling and numerical relativity simulations were employed to observe gravitational waves from merging binary black holes for the first time, and infer their astrophysical and cosmological properties.

Beyond her core expertise in modeling gravitational waves from compact-object binary systems, Buonanno, in collaboration with Yanbei Chen, computed the quantum-optical noise in the advanced-LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, and showed that quantum correlations between photon shot noise and radiation-pressure noise (i.e., the optical-spring effect) can circumvent constraints imposed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in those detectors.

She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015.