Chiara Mingarelli, assistant professor of physics, was awarded the Arthur Greer memorial Prize in recognition of her instrumental work launching a new area of research in gravitational waves. In 2025, she was awarded, as part of the NanoGrav Collaboration, the Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society High Energy Astrophysics Division for the discovery of the gravitational wave background.
Chiara commented, “I am very grateful to the Department of Physics and the Dean’s office for this honor. I’m part of an extraordinary community in NANOGrav and the International Pulsar Timing Array, where many people do essential work over many years to make this field possible. It is a privilege to be among them. I’m especially grateful to my own students, whose talent and hard work are central to everything my group accomplishes. I’m also grateful for the extensive computational resources Yale has provided, which have made this work possible.”
She added, “This prize is encouragement to keep pursuing the hardest questions in the field. The most exciting and most difficult challenge ahead will be finding individual supermassive black hole binaries — and the hunt is on!”
The Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research recognizes outstanding research conducted by ladder faculty members in the social or natural sciences, broadly construed, who are untenured at the time that the work is completed or published.
This story is adapted from the Yale News story of June 3, 2026. See below for a link to the original story.