Mariangela Lisanti facts for kids

Mariangela Lisanti, born on September 2, 1983, is a brilliant American scientist. She is a professor of physics at Princeton University. She studies mysterious things like dark matter and dark energy. She even uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help her research!

About Mariangela Lisanti

Early Life and Education

Mariangela Lisanti was born in 1983. Her parents, Anna and Anthony Lisanti, came to the United States from Italy. She grew up in a place called Pelham Gardens in The Bronx, New York. Later, she went to Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut.

When she was in high school, Mariangela did an internship at Yale University. She worked with Mark Reed, a physics professor. During this time, she designed and built a special device. This device could measure how electricity moved through a tiny nanowire made of just one atom. It only cost $35 to build!

Winning Science Competitions

Mariangela's amazing work in high school led her to win big awards.

• In 2000, she won the national finals of the Siemens Competition. This was for her device and her research on quantum mechanics, which is about how tiny particles behave.
• In 2001, she won first place in the Intel Science Talent Search.

Winning both of these top science competitions was a huge achievement. She was the first student ever to do so! Because of her success, she was named one of the world's top innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2002. She was only 18 years old at the time.

College and Advanced Studies

Mariangela went to Harvard University for her bachelor's degree. There, she studied condensed matter physics, which looks at how materials behave. After that, she earned her Ph.D. (a high-level degree) in high-energy physics from Stanford University.

Research and Discoveries

Joining Princeton University

In 2010, Mariangela Lisanti joined the Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University. She started as a research scholar. By 2013, she became an assistant professor.

Studying Particle Physics

A lot of Mariangela's famous research is about the phenomenology of collider physics. Colliders are huge machines that smash tiny particles together. Scientists then study what happens to learn about the universe. Mariangela suggested simpler ways to look for new particles in the data from these colliders. Her ideas were later used by scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider, one of the biggest particle colliders in the world.

Unraveling Dark Matter

Mariangela also works on theoretical models about dark matter. Dark matter is a mysterious substance that scientists believe makes up a big part of our universe, but we can't see it directly. In 2014, she helped write a paper that predicted when dark matter particles might be most dense in certain times of the year.

Using AI for New Discoveries

In May 2021, Mariangela and her team received special funding. This money helps them build new tools using artificial intelligence (AI). They hope these AI tools will help them find new physical laws. These laws could explain more about dark matter and dark energy, helping us understand the universe better.