Mariangela Lisanti

Mariangela Lisanti is a Professor of Physics at Princeton University and a Research Scientist in the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute. She is a theoretical astroparticle physicist studying the nature of dark matter. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and often crosses the boundary between particle and astrophysics, incorporating ideas from data science as well. Lisanti helped to pioneer the use of simplified models in LHC searches, proposed new experimental directions for direct detection experiments, and developed novel analysis methods to study signals of dark matter annihilation in gamma rays. Most recently, she has been harnessing data from astrophysical surveys to probe the fundamental nature of dark matter and map its distribution in the Milky Way.

Lisanti received her B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard in 2005 and her Ph.D. from Stanford in 2010. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science in 2013, she joined the Princeton faculty. In recent years, Lisanti received a Sloan Research Fellowship, Cottrell Scholar Award, Simons Investigator Award, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. She is the founding chair of the Princeton Physics Department’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Initiative.