Rita Sambruna

Rita M. Sambruna OMRI HonFRAS is an Italian-American astrophysicist whose research has focused on active galactic nuclei (AGN), relativistic jets, supermassive black holes, compact objects, and multiwavelength and multi-messenger astrophysics. She is Deputy Director of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2020, a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2021, and a 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was appointed a Commendatore (Commander) of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2021 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2023. She received a Laurea degree in physics from the University of Milan in 1989. Her undergraduate thesis concerned X-ray observations of magnetic cataclysmic variables.

Her research helped establish the high-energy properties of extragalactic relativistic jets through X-ray and multiwavelength observations. Sambruna and her collaborators studied high-energy radiation from jets over a wide range of physical scales, from regions near the central black hole to distances beyond the host galaxy.

Sambruna was elected a 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in the organization's Astronomy section.

In 2023, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Society recognized her contributions to the study of relativistic jets in active galaxies as well as her leadership and service at NASA.