Manuela Campanelli (scientist)

Manuela Campanelli is a distinguished professor of astrophysics of the Rochester Institute of Technology. She also holds the John Vouros endowed professorship at RIT and is the director of its Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation. Her work focuses on the astrophysics of merging black holes and neutron stars, which are powerful sources of gravitational waves, electromagnetic radiation and relativistic jets. This research is central to the fields of relativistic astrophysics and gravitational-wave astronomy.

Manuela Campanelli
Born	Switzerland
Alma mater	University of Perugia University of Bern
Occupation(s)	astrophysicist, professor
Known for	Numerical Relativity: Binary Black Holes and Gravitational Waves. GravitoMagnetohydrodynamics: Black Hole Accretion Compact Binary Mergers and Gravitational Core Collapse

She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2009), a Fellow of International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation Fellowship (2019), and a recipient of the Richard A. Isaacson award in Gravitational-Wave Science of the APS (2024).

Professional work

Campanelli is known for her groundbreaking work in gravitational wave astrophysics. She was lead author on a paper that produced a breakthrough in gravitational wave astrophysics in 2005; she also discovered that supermassive black holes can be ejected from their host galaxies at up to 4000 km/s. She then moved on to studying the behavior of matter around inspiraling black holes, both in the mini disks size, growth and potential electromagnetic emissions. She has received many awards, including the Marie Curie Fellowship (1998), the RIT Trustees Scholarship Award, was mentioned in Kip Thorne's Nobel Prize lecture and her paper for the gravitational wave breakthrough was listed as one of the landmark papers of the century by the American Physical Society. She was also the chair of the APS topical group in gravitation in 2013.

Biography

Campanelli was born in Switzerland, but moved with her family to Italy at the age of 14. She received an undergraduate degree in applied mathematics from the University of Perugia in Italy in 1991, and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Bern in Switzerland in 1996. She moved then to the University of Utah and then to the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where she began to use supercomputer simulations to understand how black holes coalesce.

After five years at the University of Texas at Brownsville, Dr. Campanelli joined the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2007.

Publications

Books

• Campanelli, Manuela (1996). Solutions to the semiclassical theory of gravity. Verlag nicht ermittelbar. OCLC 81106174.
• Campanelli, Manuela (2015). Revealing the Hidden Universe with Supercomputer Simulations of Black Hole Mergers. New York: ACM. ISBN 9781450337236. OCLC 6020229499.

Journal articles

• Baker, J.; Bruegmann, B.; Campanelli, M.; Lousto, C. O.; Takahashi, R. (31 August 2001). "Plunge waveforms from inspiralling binary black holes". Physical Review Letters. 87 (12): 121103. arXiv:gr-qc/0102037. Bibcode:2001PhRvL..87l1103B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.121103. ISSN 0031-9007. PMID 11580497. S2CID 39434471.
• Baker, J.; Campanelli, M.; Lousto, C. (7 January 2002). "The Lazarus project: A pragmatic approach to binary black hole evolutions". Physical Review D. 65 (4): 044001. arXiv:gr-qc/0104063. Bibcode:2002PhRvD..65d4001B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.65.044001. ISSN 0556-2821. S2CID 11080736.
• Baker, J.; Bruegmann, B.; Campanelli, M.; Lousto, C. O. (21 October 2000). "Gravitational waves from black hole collisions via an eclectic approach". Classical and Quantum Gravity. 17 (20): L149–L156. arXiv:gr-qc/0003027. doi:10.1088/0264-9381/17/20/102. ISSN 0264-9381. S2CID 32012276.
• Bowen, Dennis B.; Mewes, Vassilios; Campanelli, Manuela; Noble, Scott C.; Krolik, Julian H.; Zilhao, Miguel (24 January 2018). "Quasi-Periodic Behavior of Mini-Disks in Binary Black Holes Approaching Merger". The Astrophysical Journal. 853 (1): L17. arXiv:1712.05451. Bibcode:2018ApJ...853L..17B. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/aaa756. ISSN 2041-8213. S2CID 118926956.
• Campanelli, M.; Lousto, C. O.; Marronetti, P.; Zlochower, Y. (22 March 2006). "Accurate Evolutions of Orbiting Black-Hole Binaries Without Excision". Physical Review Letters. 96 (11): 111101. arXiv:gr-qc/0511048. Bibcode:2006PhRvL..96k1101C. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.111101. ISSN 0031-9007. PMID 16605808. S2CID 5954627.
• Campanelli, M.; Lousto, C. O.; Zlochower, Y. (16 August 2006). "Spinning-black-hole binaries: The orbital hang up". Physical Review D. 74 (4): 041501. arXiv:gr-qc/0604012. Bibcode:2006PhRvD..74d1501C. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.74.041501. ISSN 1550-7998. S2CID 119376905.
• d'Ascoli, Stéphane; Noble, Scott C.; Bowen, Dennis B.; Campanelli, Manuela; Krolik, Julian H.; Mewes, Vassilios (2 October 2018). "Electromagnetic Emission from Supermassive Binary Black Holes Approaching Merger". The Astrophysical Journal. 865 (2): 140. arXiv:1806.05697. Bibcode:2018ApJ...865..140D. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aad8b4. ISSN 1538-4357. S2CID 119243049.
• Merritt, David; Zlochower, Yosef; Lousto, Carlos O.; Campanelli, Manuela (25 February 2007). "Maximum gravitational recoil". Physical Review Letters. 98 (23): 231102. arXiv:gr-qc/0702133. Bibcode:2007PhRvL..98w1102C. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.231102. PMID 17677894. S2CID 29246347.
• Noble, Scott C.; Mundim, Bruno C.; Nakano, Hiroyuki; Krolik, Julian H.; Campanelli, Manuela; Zlochower, Yosef; Yunes, Nicolás (10 August 2012). "Circumbinary MHD Accretion into Inspiraling Binary Black Holes". The Astrophysical Journal. 755 (1): 51. arXiv:1204.1073. Bibcode:2012ApJ...755...51N. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/755/1/51. ISSN 0004-637X. S2CID 17805470.