Luisa Cifarelli

Cifarelli was born in Rome in 1952. She studied physics at the University of Bologna and graduated in 1975. She worked as a researcher in at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and CERN.[1] She edited the collection of scientific studies for the publication QCD at 200 TeV.[2] In 1988 she was made an associate professor at L'Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II.

Cifarelli was appointed full Professor at the University of Pisa in 1991.[3] She moved to the University of Salerno in 1993. She works at CERN, the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, DESY and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.[4] She has been involved in the design and construction of the ALICE experiment, which studies proton-proton and nucleus-nucleus collisions at extreme energies. She was made Head of the ALICE Data Analysis and Simulation Group in 2000.[5] She served as Deputy Chairperson of the time of flight experiment at ALICE.[5] She used the ALICE experiment to study quark-gluon interactions. She coordinates the Extreme Energy Events experiments, which uses muon detectors in high schools around Italy to study cosmic swarms.[6] She serves on the DarkSide project; a 20 tonne Two-Phase LAr TPC for Direct Dark Matter Detection at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso.[7]

In 2008, Cifarelli was the first woman to be made President of the Italian Physical Society in 2008.[5][8][9][10] That year she was also elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.[5] In 2011 she was appointed President of the European Physical Society.[5] Cifarelli was the first woman to be elected president of the European Physical Society.[11][12] She was made President of the Enrico Fermi Center for Study and Research.[5][13] She has spoken about the life of Enrico Fermi extensively.[13] Cifarelli has acted as editor of the European Physical Journal.[5] She serves on the editorial board of Elsevier's Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research.[14]