Catalina Curceanu

Curceanu was born in Transylvania.[1] She became interested in science as a child, and applied to the Mathematics and Physics Lyceum at Magurele in Bucharest.[2] She attributes her passion for physics to her very skilled teachers.[3] She studied physics at the University of Bucharest and graduated as a Valedictorian.[1][4] She carried out her doctoral research using the Low Energy Antiproton Ring at CERN on the OBELIX experiment.[5] She earned her PhD from the Horia Hulubei National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering.[6]

In 1992 Curceanu joined the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.[1] She uses the DAFNE (DAΦNE) collider at Frascati.[1] She is part of the VIP2 experiment (Violation of the Pauli Principle) in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso.[7][8] In 2010 she was awarded Personality of the Year by the Romanian Academy in Rome.[9][10] She works at CERN on the OBELIX experiment, looking for Exotic mesons, and DIRAC, looking for exotic pionium.[2]

She published the popular science book Dai Buchi Neri all’adroterapia. Un Viaggio nella Fisica Moderna in 2013 with Springer.[11] The book considers concepts of modern physics, including; the standard model, black holes and neutrinos.[11] In 2015 she was awarded a $85,000 grant from FQXI and the John Templeton Foundations for her quantum physics research.[1][12] Her proposal considered collapse models and the measurement problem.[13] She used an ultrapure germanium detector to test the radiation it emits.[14] Her recent work involves the SIDDHARTA experiment, looking at the strong interaction and strangeness.[15][16]

Curceanu was the Australian Institute of Physics Women in Physics lecturer in 2016.[17] In her lectures she asked "Quo Vadis the Universe'".[18] She has spoken about quantum computers at TEDx Brașov and TEDx Cluj-Napoca.[19][20] She won the 2017 European Physical Society Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics for her contributions to low-energy QCD.[21] She won a Visiting International Scholar Award from the University of Wollongong in 2017, researching detector systems for high precision spectroscopy in fundamental physics.[22] She is involved with several outreach and education activities.[4][6]