Giulia Cerini

Giulia Cerini was born in Rieti, Lazio, Italy, where she attended Liceo Classico M.T. Varrone. She earned a degree in Physics and a master’s in Astronomy and Astrophysics at La Sapienza University of Rome, focusing on supermassive black holes. She then moved to the United States, earning a second master’s in Physics and a Ph.D. at the University of Miami, where she worked on galaxy clusters and the large-scale structure of the Universe through X-ray analysis. More recently, she expanded into weak gravitational lensing and cosmology, developing multi-wavelength methods for galaxy cluster studies. She is also part of the Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) collaboration, an international high-altitude balloon project mapping dark matter through lensing.

Already as a Ph.D. student, she published in high-impact journals, delivered invited and contributed talks at leading conferences, and was awarded two competitive NASA grants as Science PI: a Chandra Program and a NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP) award. She then won the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship, and thanks to the combination of independent funding and fellowship support, she established her position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, where she now continues as JPL Postdoctoral Researcher.