Violette Impellizzeri

Violette Impellizzeri (born August 15, 1977) is an Italian astronomer, astrophysicist, and professor.

Biography
Violette Impellizzeri was born in Saronno, a comune in the Province of Varese. She attended primary and secondary school in Alcamo, Sicily. Thereafter, her family moved to Karlsruhe, Germany where her father worked as a teacher.

She earned her European baccalaureate at the European School of Karlsruhe. In 1995, she was then enrolled at the University of Bristol. She obtained a master's degree in Physics and later attained a doctorate in astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie in Bonn. Impellizzeri was a postdoctoral researcher in at the University of Virginia and worked for three years at the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) researching physical cosmology and the megamaser (MCP).

Since 2011, she has worked at ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) in Chile as an astronomer. In October 2020, she moved back to Europe to work as a program manager with Allegro (ALMA Local Expertise Group) and the European ALMA Regional Center (ARC) node in the Netherlands, hosted by Leiden Observatory. She currently teaches at Leiden University.

Activity
Impellizzeri focused on Active Galactic Nuclei during her doctoral studies at Bonn University. As part of her doctorate she collected a series of observations with the Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope to detect water masers (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) in distant galaxies. The research was successful and the discovery has been confirmed by the Very Large Array Radio Telescope of New Mexico (NRAO). This discovery was published in Nature. The discovery has relevance for the studies on the theories of the expansion of the universe, and especially, on the calculation of the Hubble constant which measures the relationship between distance and speed of celestial bodies (galaxies).

While at the University of Virginia, Impellizzeri was recruited by the NRAO in 2007 to work on the cosmology project of MCP (Megamaser Cosmology Project). She coordinated the research at the Green Bank Telescope in Virginia with the observations made with the VLBI (Very Long Baseline Observatory). Impellizzeri worked on the project for three years. She then remained a collaborator over the subsequent ten years.

Impellizzeri joined the Atacama Cosmology Telescope project - the largest radio telescope in the world at the 5 km altitude, - as a NRAO astronomer tasked with the integration of the VLBI observations within Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) (under the title of friend of VLBI). She participated in data integration with other remote telescopes, where a distance of 10,000 kilometers can be leveraged as if the observations were made by one giant telescope with a 10,000 km diameter.

In 2017, observations commenced at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) hoping to realize the first image of a black hole, previously only considered theoretically. First direct proof of their existence (in contrast to Andrea Ghez's 2020 Nobel prize, Stefan Gillessen and others) was accomplished by publishing the photograph of the black hole in the center of the galaxy Messier 87 at a distance of 56 million light years; this black hole has a mass of 6.5 billion solar masses. The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, Apex, the 30 meters IRAM of Grenoble, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Alfonso Serrano telescope, the Submillimeter Array telescope, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope.

Honors

 * Earned the title of Woman of Stars and a publication on Nature for the discovery of the most ancient water in the universe;
 * 11 August 2018: Assigned the Tablet Paul Harris Fellow (the greatest acknowledgment of Rotary Clubs) for the diffusion of Italian culture;
 * 18 April 2019: the Chilean government awarded the astronomer with a medal, as official recognition for the work done in the exploration of the black hole.
 * 12 August 2019: A Tablet is given by the Mayor of Alcamo for her prestigious career in the field of scientific research.
 * 2020: Together with the other Astrophysicists who realized the photo of the black hole, she was awarded with the Breakthrough Prize (2020).
 * 11 August 2021: Yearly Prize by the Kiwanis club of Alcamo, with the following motivation: To Violette Impellizzeri, astronomer with an international fame, for her dedication for the study of the mysteries of universe and for the safeguard of environment.
 * 28 November 2022: KHMW Outreach Award for her project ALMA for Leiden.