Chiara Mingarelli

Chiara Mingarelli's picture
Assistant Professor
KT 445
Research Areas: 
Astrophysics & Cosmology
Research Type: 
Theorist
Current Projects: 

NANOGrav Collaboration

Biographical Sketch: 

Prof. Chiara M. F. Mingarelli is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist. Previously, Mingarelli was a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, and at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, and a Flatiron Research Fellow.

Mingarelli received her Ph.D from the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2014, where she worked with Prof. Alberto Vecchio. Her core research is focused on using Pulsar Timing Arrays to detect low-frequency gravitational waves, with forays into electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational-wave events, such as fast radio bursts.

Mingarelli has accumulated over $1M in grants and prizes over her career from the NSF, the ERC, and Amazon. Her honors and awards include the AAS 2023 HEAD Early Career Prize, 2022 Springer-Nature “Inspiring Women in Science” (runner-up), APS “Woman Physicist of the Month” for November 2016, her thesis was published in the Springer Thesis Series (2015), and grants from the Royal Astronomical Society, the UK Institute of Physics for both research and outreach, and the National Science Foundation. She has written an invited guest article for Scientific American, contributes to Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, and regularly appears on the Science Channel’s “How the Universe Works”.

Research: 

Prof. Mingarelli is an astrophysicist who models the cosmic population of supermassive black hole binary mergers. Gas and stars interact with black holes, and those interactions can leave distinctive imprints in their gravitational wave signatures. These individual systems create a gravitational wave background, and she predicts how those astrophysical signatures manifest.

Specifically, Mingarelli is best known for her work on predicting and modeling anisotropy in the gravitational-wave background (e.g. Mingarelli et al. 2013), multimessenger astrophysics (e.g. Mingarelli et al. 2017 and Xin, Mingarelli, Hazboun 2021), and extracting properties of the cosmic population of supermassive black hole binaries for the amplitude of the gravitational wave background (Casey-Clyde, Mingarelli, et al. 2022).

Education: 
Ph.D. 2014, University of Birmingham, UK