In preparation for the Friends of IHES Gala on Women in Fundamental Research that took place on November 16, 2021, IHES collected testimonies from women related to IHES: previous and current visitors, as well as female scientists currently at IHES or connected to the Institute.

Discover below the testimony of Alessandra Buonanno, Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, also called Albert Einstein Institute.

She looks back on her two-year postdoctoral appointment at IHES as she worked with Thibault Damour. Incidentally, in 2021, Alessandra received three prestigious awards, the Galileo Galilei medal, the Dirac Medal and the Balzan prize, for her work on gravitational waves, carried out in collaboration with Thibault Damour, and initiated when she was a postdoc at the Institute.