Eleonora Polini is a physicist specializing in quantum noise reduction for gravitational wave detectors. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Physics from La Sapienza University of Rome, where she received the Enrico Persico and Tito Maiani Prizes for academic excellence.
She completed her PhD at the Laboratoire d’Annecy de Physique des Particules and Université Savoie Mont Blanc, focusing on frequency-dependent squeezing in the Virgo detector. Her work included upgrading the Output Mode Cleaner cavity and investigating stray light noise, earning her the Virgo Award (2022) and GWIC–Braccini Prize (2023).
She later conducted postdoctoral research at MIT, working on scattered light analysis for LIGO Hanford, assembling Output Mode Cleaner cavities at Caltech, and developing fiber interferometers for entangled-state gravitational measurements.
Currently, she is a Research Scientist at CNRS in the ARTEMIS laboratory at the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, focusing on gravitational wave detectors (current and future) and fundamental physics experiments.