Marcelle Soares-Santos

Marcelle was born in Vitória, Brazil, in 1983. Two years later, her family moved to Parauapebas, in the Carajás Mountains, in the State of Pará. She graduated in Physics at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (Ufes) in 2004. She then pursued a Master's degree and Doctorate in Astronomy at the University of São Paulo (USP), defending her Doctorate dissertation in 2010.[2]

Soares-Santos became Assistant Professor of Physics at the Brandeis University, and since 2010 a researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, near Chicago. Her research at Fermilab was focused on the characteristics of gravitational waves and in dark energy.[2][3][4] There, Soares-Santos contributed to the construction of the Dark Energy Camera, one of the largest telescope cameras in the world, which she employed to search for gravitational wave-emitting collisions of neutron stars and black holes.[1] Her four-year work at the Fermilab was rewarded: in 2014, she was bestowed the Alvin Tollestrup Award for her postdoctoral research.[5]

In 2019, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded Marcelle Soares-Santos a Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers.[6][7]