The Dirac Medal to the Italian physicist Alessandra Buonanno

For the first time the Dirac Medal, one of the main international scientific prizes, has been awarded to an Italian researcher, Alessandra Buonanno, who works in Germany, at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational physics from Potsdam.

Assigned by Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Ictp), the Dirac Medal rewards Buonanno for her theoretical research underlying the detection of gravitational waves. In addition to being the first Italian, Buonanno is the second woman ever to receive the Dirac Medal. The physicists who were awarded the medal were: Thibault Damour, Frans Pretorius and Saul Teukolsky.

Alessandra Buonanno is the head of the Astrophysics and Cosmological Relativity division of theMax Planck Institute, Germany. After graduating and earning a PhD in Physics at theUniversity of Pisa, the researcher worked on the CERN of Geneva and then in France, in theInstitut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (Ihes). He also worked in the Laboratory of Astrophysics and Cosmology (APC) of Paris (2001), in theUniversity of Maryland (2005) and in 2014 she was appointed co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam.

All four physicists were honored for their contributions to the research that led to the discovery of gravitational waves, in particular for establishing the properties of gravitational waves produced when two stars or two black holes orbit each other and then merge. “The theoretical work of this year's Dirac Medalists has been fundamental to interpreting the observations made by Ligo, an extremely sophisticated experiment,” said the director of the ICTP, Atisha Dabholkar, announcing the award winners.

"It deals with - added – of a stunning test of the accuracy of Einstein's general theory of relativity. It is a wonderful tribute to the extraordinary power of our theoretical understanding of nature, which until recently seemed too bizarre to be verified by observation.”

Of love, of the French Institute of Higher Scientific Studies (Ihes) works in France, at the Institut des Hautes E'tudes Scientifiques (IHE'S) and in 2016 he won the Special Breakthrough Prize for fundamental physics for the detection of gravitational waves; Pretorius is director of the Princeton Gravity Initiative of thePrinceton University, He is the author of the first computer code that simulates the fusion of two black holes; also Teukolsky works in the United States, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Cornell University.