Rosalba Perna is an Italian and American theoretical astrophysicist whose research concerns high-energy cosmic sources including gamma-ray bursts and neutron star mergers.
Perna earned a laurea at the University of Salerno in 1993, with a thesis concerning the quantum Hall effect.
[2] She completed a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1999, with the dissertation Theoretical studies of Gamma-Ray Bursts supervised by Avi Loeb.
[2] Perna won the SIGRAV Prize of the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation in 2010.
[2] In 2014 she was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), after a nomination from the APS Division of Astrophysics, "for her pioneering contributions to our understanding of the long and short gamma-ray bursts, including the development of advanced models to describe their properties and environments, calculations of their particle and radiative emission, and innovative treatment of the time-dependent photoinization in the dusty environment around the bursts".