Palmese Honored With 2025 INFN Bruno Touschek Award
Heidi Opdyke
- Associate Dean of Marketing and Communications, MCS
- Email opdyke@andrew.cmu.edu
- Phone 412-268-9982
The Italian Scientists & Scholars in North America Foundation (ISSNAF) recently awarded Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor of Physics Antonella Palmese the 2025 INFN Bruno Touschek Award.
An observational cosmologist working at the interface between gravitational wave experiments and large sky surveys, Palmese is a member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics.
Palmese received the award in early November at the Embassy of Italy in Washington, D.C. for her pioneering work on the integration of galaxy surveys and gravitational wave astronomy, and for playing a leadership role in developing a new cosmological analysis technique. Her research is funded by NASA and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Established in 2022 by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), this award honors the memory of Professor Bruno Touschek, a pioneer in elementary particle physics and particle accelerators. It recognizes outstanding contributions to the study of fundamental interactions of matter, including elementary particle physics, nuclear physics, cosmology, and the physics of particle beams.
Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Palmese was a NASA Einstein Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior awards include the 2022 Da Vinci award for engineering/math and physics, which recognizes early career researchers working in the San Francisco Bay area. In 2018, the Royal Astronomical Society honored her as runner-up for the Michael Penston Prize for the best astronomy doctoral thesis in the United Kingdom.
She previously was a postdoctoral research associate in the Cosmic Physics Center group at Fermi National Laboratory and an affiliate fellow at the University of Chicago. Palmese earned her undergraduate and master's degrees from La Sapienza University of Rome. She earned her doctorate at the University College London where she worked on the Dark Energy Survey.
