Violette Impellizzeri

In October 2020, she moved back to Europe, working as a program manager with Allegro (ALMA Local Expertise Group), the European ALMA Regional Center (ARC) node in the Netherlands, which is hosted by Leiden Observatory. She teaches at Leiden University. Established together with the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA), and the Physical Sciences division of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO/EW), Allegro integrates the expertise relevant to ALMA within the astronomical institutions and universities in the Netherlands.

In 2017, they started the observations with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) hoping to realize the first image of a Black hole. By then, black holes had only been a theory, big masses with an enormous gravitational force devouring everything approaching them and from which nothing escaped, not even light. Nobody, however, could prove their existence, unless indirectly (see about Andrea Ghez the Nobel prize in 2020, Stefan Gillessen and others) until they published the first photo.

In 2011, she started working with ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) in Chile. Violette had to reach the desert of Atacama and make observations together with a team of astronomers and astrophysicists by means of the greatest Radio telescope in the world, made up of 66 antennas. She started working there as an astronomer experienced with operations of ALMA and assumed several roles until 2020. The project's financing came from the United States, Europe and Japan.

The discovery has relevance for the studies on the theories of the expansion of the universe, and especially, on the calculation of the Hubble constant which measures the relationship between distance and speed of celestial bodies (galaxies). In 2008 Impellizzeri was recruited by the NRAO to work on the cosmology project of MCP (Megamaser Cosmology Project). She was entrusted with the coordination of the research conducted with the Green Bank Telescope in Virginia, and of the observations made with the VLBI (Very Long Baseline Observatory). She worked intensively for the MCP project during the three years spent in Virginia but remained as a collaborator in the project over the ensuing ten years.

She completed her studies at the European School of Karlsruhe, where she earned her European baccalaureate. In 1995, she entered the University of Bristol. She obtained a master in Physics and attained a doctorate in astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie in Bonn. Impellizzeri moved to the United States as a postdoctoral researcher in Charlottesville, Virginia working for three years at the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) researching physical cosmology and the megamaser (MCP).

Violette Impellizzeri (born 15 August 1977 in Palermo), is an Italian astronomer, astrophysicist, and professor.