Listening to the Universe: Unlocking Cosmic Mysteries Through Gravitational Waves

Antonella Palmese is an observational cosmologist exploring the Universe through both light and gravitational waves. She is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where her group’s research is supported by NASA and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

In 2021, she was awarded the prestigious NASA Einstein Fellowship, which she carried out at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Prof. Saul Perlmutter. Before that, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and an Affiliate Fellow at the University of Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. in Cosmology from University College London under Prof. Ofer Lahav, after completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at La Sapienza University of Rome.

Antonella’s research combines gravitational wave detections and electromagnetic observations—two complementary cosmic “messengers”—to study the composition and expansion of the Universe. By analyzing data from cataclysmic events like black hole and neutron star mergers, she measures how fast the Universe is expanding using the “standard siren” method.

Her goal is to help resolve one of modern cosmology’s biggest puzzles—the “Hubble tension,” a long-standing discrepancy between different measurements of the Universe’s expansion rate—by providing independent insights drawn from the newest frontier of astrophysics: gravitational waves.