Alessandra Buonanno earned her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in Italy. After a brief period spent at the theory division of CERN, she held postdoctoral positions at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France and at the California Institute of Technology in the USA. She was a staff researcher (CR1) at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) and Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC) in Paris with the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) before joining the University of Maryland as physics professor. While at the University of Maryland, Buonanno has been a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is a Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.