[6] She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration,[7] which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015.

[8] Buonanno earned her MSc in 1993, and she completed her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in 1996.

[9] After a brief period spent at the theory division of CERN, she held a postdoctoral position at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France and the R.C.

[12] She was the William and Flora Hewlett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, from 2011 to 2012.

[14] Buonanno's work with Thibault Damour of reducing the two-body problem in general relativity to an effective one-body formalism,[15][16] and her research at the intersection of analytical-relativity modeling[17][18][19] and numerical relativity simulations were employed to observe gravitational waves from merging binary black holes for the first time, and infer their astrophysical and cosmological properties.