Laura Ferrarese

Laura Ferrarese is a researcher in space science at the National Research Council of Canada. Her primary work has been performed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

Early life and career

Laura Ferrarese was born in Padua, Italy and studied at the University of Padova, going on to receive a PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1996. She was a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology before becoming a professor at Rutgers University in 2000.

Research

Laura Ferrarese's work has earned her the opportunity to spearhead projects using facilities such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. In her work, Ferrarese uses data from ground and space-based observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).

According to the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, and the Peter G. Martin Award in 2015. In 2020, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

On 30 November 2000, Ferrarese was featured in one of the episodes called "supermassive black holes" in the Horizon TV series.

Publications

Ferrarese's most cited peer-review publications include: "Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, 2001 "Central Masses and Broad-Line Region Sizes of Active Galactic Nuclei. II. A Homogeneous Analysis of a Large Reverberation-Mapping Database", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, 2004 "Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past Present and Future Research", appeared in Space Science Reviews, 2005 "Beyond the Bulge: A Fundamental Relation between Supermassive Black Holes and Dark Matter Halos", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2002 "The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. VI. Isophotal Analysis and the Structure of Early-Type Galaxies", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2006

Affiliations

Laura Ferrarese is an active member of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) and is affiliated with Division B Facilities, Technologies and Data Science, Division H Interstellar Matter and Local Universe and Division J Galaxies and Cosmology. She was a Past Member of Division VIII Galaxies & the Universe until 2012 and Commission 28 Galaxies until 2015 within the IAU. She is also a member of the American Astronomical Society and of the Canadian Astronomical Society.