Maria Alessandra Papa (born 1967) is an Italian physicist specializing in the observation of gravitational waves.
She also coordinates the use of the Einstein@Home project for volunteer computing in the search for gravitational waves in LIGO data.
[1] After postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, she became a permanent staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute in 2003.
She moved to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee as a tenure-track and later tenured researcher in 2005, but returned to the Max Planck Institute in 2007, and became group leader there in 2018.
[1] Papa was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2014, after a nomination from the APS Division of Gravitational Physics, "for numerous key contributions to gravitational-wave astronomy, including devising new data analysis methods for gravitational waves from pulsars and coordinating the worldwide exchange and analysis of data".