Campanelli received her B.Sc (Laurea) in Mathematics from the University of Perugia in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the  University of Bern in 1996. She was a recipient of a Marie-Curie Fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) from 1998-2001. She was an associate professor of the University of Texas at Brownsville from 2002-2006, where she served as an associate director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy (CGWA) (PhysicsCentral). Since 2007, she is an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology where she founded and heads the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (related story).

Last year, she was elected as a member-at-large of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Computational Physics (DCOMP), and served in the nominating committee of the Topical Group on Gravitation (GGR). She also served on numerous review panels for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA. She is a member of the Ligo Scientific Collaboration (LSC).

Research:

Campanelli’s research includes topics in gravitational physics, quantum field theory in curved spacetimes, relativistic astrophysics and numerical relativity simulation and modeling of binary black-hole coalescences. She is also interested in high-performance and grid computing. She was one of the co-developers of Lazarus approach that combined numerical and perturbation techniques to gain the first insights into the binary black hole problem, and a co-discoverer of a powerful numerical technique, known as moving puncture, capable of solving the Einstein field equations for black-hole mergers on supercomputers (Astronomy); a decades long standing problem in numerical relativity. She also studied violent gravitational wave recoil that follows a two black-hole merger capable of ejecting supermassive black holes from the core of most active galaxies (APS focus, New Scientist). She is now turning her interests into new computational astrophysics problems that may help connect gravitational wave observations to electromagnetic observations.