Marcelle Soares-Santos

Marcelle Soares-Santos is a Brazilian physicist and a full professor at the University of Zürich. Previously she worked as an associate professor of Physics and Experimental Cosmology and Astrophysics formerly at the University of Michigan and Brandeis University and before that at permanent scientists at Fermilab.

Biography Marcelle was born in Vitória, Brazil, in 1983. Two years later, her family moved to Parauapebas, in the Carajás Mountains, in the State of Pará. She graduated in Physics at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (Ufes) in 2004. She then pursued a Master's degree and Doctorate in Astronomy at the University of São Paulo (USP), defending her Doctorate dissertation in 2010. There, Soares-Santos contributed to the construction of the Dark Energy Camera, one of the largest telescope cameras in the world, which she employed to search for gravitational wave-emitting collisions of neutron stars and black holes.

In 2020 she became assistant professor in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

In 2019, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded Marcelle Soares-Santos a Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers.

She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2023, "for organizing and leading a team that co-discovered the optical kilonova counterpart to the first binary neutron star gravitational wave event from LIGO-Virgo".