Anna Barnacka

Anna Barnacka is a Polish astrophysicist and entrepreneur. She is known for her work on gravitational lensing, and astroparticle physics.

Education
Barnacka received her PhDs in astronomy from Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, and physics from Paris-Sud University conducting her research at French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in Paris, France. After earning her doctorates, she became a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She received a NASA Einstein Fellowship in 2015, during which she researched the phenomena of gravitational lensing and pioneered techniques for turning gravitational lenses into high-resolution telescopes.

Barnacka's research has also focused on very high energy astroparticle physics, where she has been a member of international collaborations, including the Cherenkov Telescope Array, VERITAS, and H.E.S.S.  she has an h-index of 43 with over 7100 citations to her work.

Barnacka is the founder and CEO of MindMics, a company presenting new tools to monitor vital signs related to cardiovascular health and wellness, and she has patent applications associated with this work. MindMics acts as a platform that is composed of three parts: the hardware, the data systems and algorithms, and the interface. The company's earbud hardware measures and provides data on heart, brain, and other body function activity using infrasonic hemodynography technology. She has conducted studies on the technology's effectiveness, the results of which were published in professional publications such as the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

Awards and honors
In 2012, Barnacka received the Copernicus Astronomical Center Young Scientist Award primarily in recognition of her 2012 paper in Physical Review.

In 2020, Barnacka received Nicolaus Copernicus Prize in the category of Cosmology and Astrophysics (an honor given once every five years) by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences for the outstanding monothematic cycle of five manuscripts under the collective title: Development of a method of using gravitational lensing for astronomical measurements with high resolution. The work is summarized in the invited review manuscript in Physics Reports.