Alessandra Buonanno


Alessandra Buonanno is a theoretical physicist. She is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, and head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department. She holds a College Park 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.

Early life and education

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 in France and a R.C. Tolman Prize Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology.

Career and research

Buonanno became a permanent researcher in 2001 at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris and then at the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 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'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 can circumvent constraints imposed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in those detectors.

Awards and honors