Francesca Calegari (born 11 January 1981) is an Italian physicist who is lead of the Attosecond Science division at the Center for Free Electron Laser Science at

DESY The Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (English ''German Electron Synchrotron''), commonly referred to by the abbreviation DESY, is a national research center in Germany. It operates particle accelerators used to investigate the structure of matt ...

. She is a professor at the

University of Hamburg The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vor ...

. Calegari is interested in the electron dynamics of complex systems. She was awarded the International Commission of Optics (ICO) Prize and the Ernst Abbe Medal.

Early life and education

Calegari studied physics at the University of Milan. She moved to the

Polytechnic University of Milan The Polytechnic University of Milan () is the largest technical university in Italy, with about 42,000 students. The university offers undergraduate, graduate and higher education courses in engineering, architecture and design. Founded in 186 ...

for her doctoral research. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia (INFM), where she spent a year before moving back to the Polytechnic University of Milan.

Research and career

In 2011, Calegari was made a staff scientist in the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnology. She held a joint position at the Polytechnic University of Milan. In 2016, she moved to

and was made professor at the

. She was made chair of the PIER (the partnership between Hamburg and DESY) Executive Board. Calegari studies electron dynamics in complex systems, ranging from molecules to biomaterials and functional nanostructures. She has developed table top light sources for precise time dependent measurements across multiple different energy ranges. In particular she has developed attosecond approaches to understand the processes that occur in biomolecules (e.g. DNA).

Awards and honours

* 2017 International Commission for Optics (ICO) Prize * 2017 Ernst Abbe Medal * 2018 Zdenek Herman Molec Young Scientist Prize * 2020 Elected Fellow of the Optical Society

Selected publications

* * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Calegari, Francesca 1981 births Living people University of Milan alumni Polytechnic University of Milan alumni Academic staff of the University of Hamburg Italian women physicists 21st-century Italian physicists 21st-century Italian women scientists