Rate My Professor Cecilia Lunardini

Cecilia Lunardini is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University. She received her bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Pavia, Italy, in 1998, graduating with honors (110/110 cum laude), with a thesis on exclusive generation of photons in Quantum Electrodynamics. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA-ISAS) in Trieste, Italy, in 2001, under advisors Alexei Yu. Smirnov and Georg G. Raffelt, with a thesis titled "Matter effects on conversion of neutrinos from supernovae and cosmological sources." Her career includes postdoctoral work as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2001-2004), Research Assistant Professor and Five-Year Fellow at the University of Washington Institute for Nuclear Theory (2004-2007), Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory's RIKEN BNL Research Center (2007-2012), Assistant Professor at Arizona State University (2007-2012), and Associate Professor with tenure since 2012.

Lunardini's research focuses on neutrino astrophysics at the intersection of nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. She studies neutrinos from astrophysical sources, including supernova neutrinos, diffuse neutrino fluxes, high-energy neutrinos, flavor conversion, Earth matter effects, and multimessenger signals such as those from the Fermi bubbles and tidal disruption events. As Principal Investigator, she has secured grants including NSF PHY-0854827 ($375,000, 2009-2012), NSF PHY-1205745 ($540,000, 2012-2015), DOE-SC0015406 ($100,000, 2016-2017), and NSF-1613708 ($300,000, 2017-2020). Awards include the Giorgio Gamberini Prize for best theory PhD thesis from Scuola Normale (2003), invited plenary talks at Neutrino 2006 and Neutrino 2014 conferences, qualification for full professor in Italy (2014), Distinguished Referee for the European Physical Journal (2016), and a DAAD fellowship (2016). Key publications encompass "High Energy Neutrinos from the Fermi Bubbles" (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2012), "Diffuse supernova neutrinos: oscillation effects, stellar cooling and progenitor mass dependence" (JCAP, 2012), "Diffuse Neutrino Flux from Supernovae" (Handbook of Supernovae, 2016), "Detecting non-relativistic cosmic neutrinos by capture on tritium: phenomenology and physics potential" (JCAP, 2014), and recent works on multimessenger neutrinos from tidal disruptions.