Alessandra Buonanno

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

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

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

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.