Chiara Mingarelli

Mingarelli grew up in Ottawa, Canada. She completed a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Carleton University, Canada, in 2006.[1] She moved to the University of Bologna to study for a Masters in Astrophysics and Cosmology, which she achieved in 2009.[1] Mingarelli's PhD thesis "Gravitational Wave Astrophysics with Pulsar Timing Arrays", was selected by Springer Nature as an Outstanding PhD thesis in 2016.[2][3] She earned her PhD at the University of Birmingham with Alberto Vecchio in 2014.[4][5]

Mingarelli is a gravitational wave astrophysicist attempting to understand the merging of supermassive black holes.[4] Mingarelli predicts the nanohertz gravitational wave signatures of such mergers.[6] She will measure them using pulsar timing arrays, which can characterise the cosmic merger history of binary black hole systems.[7][4] The systems emit nanohertz gravitational waves. After completing her PhD, Mingarelli was awarded a European Union Marie Curie International Fellowship, which she brought to the California Institute of Technology.[1] There she continued to work on gravitational waves.[8] At Caltech she taught students in the Gravitational Wave Astrophysics school about Pulsar Timing Arrays.[9] Mingarelli spent the return phase of the Marie Curie Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.[1] She is regularly an invited speaker at scientific conferences.[10][11]

Mingarelli appeared on Stargazing Live in 2012.[12] She was featured on the BBC Radio Cambridgeshire show The Naked Scientists.[13] In 2013 the Royal Astronomical Society selected Mingarelli as a Voice of the Future, and she attended an interview session at the House of Commons.[14] She regularly appears on science themed podcasts and video series.[15][16][17][18][19][20] She has been involved with Amy Poehler's Smart Girls, as a blogger and interviewee.[21][22][23][24][25][26] After the first detection of gravitational waves, Mingarelli was featured in The New York Times.[12] She has contributed to popular science journals, including Scientific American, Nautilus, The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, Wired and the New Scientist.[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] Mingarelli maintains a social media presence on sites such as Twitter, where she is an advocate for "science, coffee and girl power".[36]