"It is a great honor for me to receive this prestigious award. It is a wonderful recognition not only of my research on gravitational waves, but of the work that the members of my research groups at AEI and the University of Maryland have done over many years ", these are the first words of Alessandra Buonanno, head of the department "Astrophysics and Cosmological Relativity" at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute / AEI) in Potsdam.
Dirac medal, motivation for recognition
Alessandra Buonanno received the Dirac medal, one of the main international scientific awards. It is the first time for an Italian researcher. Awarded by the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (Ictp), the medal also went to physicists Thibault Damour, Frans Pretorius and Saul Teukolsky. Buonanno is the second woman ever to receive the award. Together with Thibault Damour, Buonanno developed a formalism to reduce the two-body problem of general relativity to a one-body problem.
The international selection committee awarded the medal with the following motivation: “The medal and the Dirac 2021 prize are awarded to Alessandra Buonanno, Thibault Damour, Frans Pretorius and Saul Teukolsky. They established the predicted properties of gravitational waves in the curvature of spacetime produced when stars or black holes spiral together and merge. This result was essential for the LIGO detection of gravitational waves from these energetic astronomical events. The coherence of theory and observation is an impressive check on the accuracy of the general theory of relativity ”.
Who is Alessandra Buonanno
Alessandra Buonanno studied theoretical physics in Pisa. She has held faculty positions in Paris and at the University of Maryland, where she became full professor in 2010. She is Principal Investigator of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. For his contributions to the discoveries of LIGO and Virgo, he has received numerous awards. Among the most important Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 2018 - the most prestigious research award in Germany - and the medal Galileo Galilei 2021.
She was recently elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Alessandra Buonanno is also a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. And it is part of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Buonanno is a Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation and of the American Physical Society. He holds a research chair at the University of Maryland,
The Dirac Medal of the ICTP, awarded for the first time in 1985, is bestowed in honor of Paul Dirac, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century and a faithful friend of the Center. The award is given annually on Dirac's birthday, August 8, to scientists who have made significant contributions to theoretical physics. Prize winners will also receive a $ 5000 prize.
Featured photo source: Sven Döring | http://www.svendoering.com, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
