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