Chiara Mingarelli is an Italian-Canadian astrophysicist who researches gravitational waves. She is an assistant professor of physics at Yale University since 2023, and previously an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut (2020–2023). She is also a science writer and communicator.

Education

Mingarelli grew up in

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

, Canada. She completed a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Carleton University, Canada, in 2006. She moved to the University of Bologna to study for a master's in Astrophysics and Cosmology, which she achieved in 2009. Mingarelli's PhD thesis "Gravitational Wave Astrophysics with Pulsar Timing Arrays", was selected by

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as an ''Outstanding PhD thesis'' in 2016. She earned her PhD at the University of Birmingham with

Alberto Vecchio Alberto Vecchio () is a physicist, professor at University of Birmingham in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and the Director of the Institute of Gravitational Wave Astronomy. He was a contributor in the upgrade of LIGO to Advanced LIGO which re ...

in 2014.

Research

Mingarelli is a gravitational wave astrophysicist attempting to understand the merging of supermassive black holes. Mingarelli predicts the nanohertz gravitational wave signatures of such mergers. She will measure them using

pulsar timing array A pulsar timing array (PTA) is a set of pulsars which is analysed to search for correlated signatures in the pulse arrival times. There are many applications for pulsar timing arrays. The best known is the use of an array of millisecond pulsars to d ...

s, which can characterise the cosmic merger history of binary black hole systems. The systems emit nanohertz gravitational waves. After completing her PhD, Mingarelli was awarded a European Union Marie Curie International Fellowship, which she brought to the California Institute of Technology. There she continued to work on gravitational waves. At Caltech she taught students in the Gravitational Wave Astrophysics school about Pulsar Timing Arrays. Mingarelli spent the return phase of the Marie Curie Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. She is regularly an invited speaker at scientific conferences.

Public engagements

Mingarelli appeared on '' Stargazing Live'' in 2012. She was featured on the BBC Radio Cambridgeshire show ''

The Naked Scientists ''The Naked Scientists'' is a one-hour audience-interactive science radio talk show broadcast live by the BBC in the East of England, nationally by BBC Radio 5 Live and internationally on ABC Radio National, Australia; it is also distributed g ...

''. In 2013 the Royal Astronomical Society selected Mingarelli as a ''Voice of the Future'', and she attended an interview session at the House of Commons. She regularly appears on science themed podcasts and video series. She has been involved with Amy Poehler's Smart Girls, as a blogger and interviewee. After the first detection of gravitational waves, Mingarelli was featured in '' The New York Times''. She has contributed to popular science journals, including '' Scientific American'', '' Nautilus'', '' The Wall Street Journal'', ''

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'', '' Wired'' and the '' New Scientist''. Mingarelli maintains a social media presence on sites such as Twitter, where she is an advocate for "science, coffee and girl power".

Awards

* Marie Curie Alumni Career Award

- 2023
Early Career Prize
High Energy Astrophysics Division of the

American Astronomical Society The American Astronomical Society (AAS, sometimes spoken as "double-A-S") is an American society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. The primary objective of the AAS is to promote the adv ...

, 2023
SpringerNature Award
for "Scientific Achievement", 2022 Runner Up * Amazon Web Services ML Award — October 2018 * Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship — 2014 - 2017 * Marie Curie Actions “Communicating Science” Prize — 2017 * Woman Physicist of the Month, November 2016 * Springer Thesis Award — 2015

Publications

# C. Xin, C. M. F. Mingarelli, J. S. Hazboun, Multimessenger pulsar timing arrayconstraints on supermassive black hole binaries traced by periodic light curves,submitted to ApJ, arXiv:2009.11865.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mingarelli, Chiara Living people Italian astrophysicists Canadian astrophysicists Italian women scientists Science communicators 21st-century Italian physicists 21st-century Canadian physicists 21st-century Canadian women scientists Carleton University alumni University of Bologna alumni Alumni of the University of Birmingham California Institute of Technology faculty Italian science writers Canadian science writers Women science writers 21st-century Italian women writers 21st-century Canadian women writers 21st-century Italian writers 21st-century Canadian non-fiction writers Canadian women non-fiction writers Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century Italian women scientists