Alessia Gualandris is a post-doctoral researcher at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She received a M.Sc. in 2002 from the University of Milano, Italy, and a Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.  As a Ph.D student, her research has focused mainly on the dynamics of star clusters and galactic nuclei, both from a theoretical and computational point of view. She has developed parallel N-body codes for the simulation of dense stellar systems, taking advantage of special purpose hardware to accelerate the computation of gravitational forces.  As a post-doc, she has worked on the dynamics of recoiling super-massive black holes and on the perturbations of the young stars in the Milky Way center.