[picture]
 Alessandra Buonanno
Associate Professor of Physics
University of Maryland, 
College Park, MD 20742-4111 
Gravitation Theory Group - Department of Physics
Room 4502E
Phone: (301)-405-1440 
FAX: (301)-314-9525 
E-mail: buonanno@physics.umd.edu



I was an undergraduate and graduate student at the Department of Physics of the University of Pisa, in Italy. After spending eight
months at CERN, as research associate, I went to the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, in the Paris area, as postdoctoral
scholar and, then, to the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, as Tolman fellow. I was then hired by the Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, as chargée de recherche de premiere classe (CR1). I worked at the Institut d'
Astrophysique de Paris and then at the Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie, in Paris. I joined the Physics faculty at Maryland
in September 2005.  
 
Curriculum vitae et studiorum
Research interests: theoretical physics, gravitational-wave physics and cosmology of the early Universe

My current research covers a wide range of problems related to the theory and the detection of gravitational waves, including

- analytical description of the two-body dynamics during the last stages of inspiral, plunge and merger 
 
- source-modeling of gravitational waves emitted by black-hole binaries

- spin effects in compact binaries

- quantum-optical noise in gravitational-wave detectors

- design of gravitational-wave detectors operating at or below the standard quantum limit

- primordial gravitational waves



I am a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration

Current group members:

Yi Pan (postdoctoral scholar)

Etienne Racine (postdoctoral scholar)


Evan Ochsner (graduate student)


Former group members:

Jeremy Schnittman (Chandra Fellow, Johns Hopkins)


Teaching:

- Gravitational-wave physics (PHYS 879)
 
   Spring 2006
 
- Classical mechanics (PHYS 405)

   Spring 2007


Recent Publications
(Via Spires Database )

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Last updated: 22 November 2006
Send your comments to: buonanno@physics.umd.edu