Catalina Curceanu

Curceanu was born in Transylvania.^[1] She became interested in science as a child, and applied to the Mathematics and Physics Lyceum at Magurele in Bucharest.^[2] She attributes her passion for physics to her very skilled teachers.^[3] She studied physics at the University of Bucharest and graduated as a Valedictorian.^[1][4] She carried out her doctoral research using the Low Energy Antiproton Ring at CERN on the OBELIX experiment.^[5] She earned her PhD from the Horia Hulubei National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering.^[6]

In 1992 Curceanu joined the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.^[1] She uses the DAFNE (DAΦNE) collider at Frascati.^[1] She is part of the VIP2 experiment (Violation of the Pauli Principle) in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso.^[7][8] In 2010 she was awarded Personality of the Year by the Romanian Academy in Rome.^[9][10] She works at CERN on the OBELIX experiment, looking for Exotic mesons, and DIRAC, looking for exotic pionium.^[2]

She published the popular science book Dai Buchi Neri all'adroterapia. Un Viaggio nella Fisica Moderna in 2013 with Springer.^[11] The book considers concepts of modern physics, including; the standard model, black holes and neutrinos.^[11] In 2015 she was awarded a $85,000 grant from FQXI and the John Templeton Foundations for her quantum physics research.^[1][12] Her proposal considered collapse models and the measurement problem.^[13] She used an ultrapure germanium detector to test the radiation it emits.^[14] Her recent work involves the SIDDHARTA experiment, looking at the strong interaction and strangeness.^[15][16]

Curceanu was the Australian Institute of Physics Women in Physics lecturer in 2016.^[17] In her lectures she asked "Quo Vadis the Universe'".^[18] She has spoken about quantum computers at TEDx Brașov and TEDx Cluj-Napoca.^[19][20] She won the 2017 European Physical Society Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics for her contributions to low-energy QCD.^[21] She won a Visiting International Scholar Award from the University of Wollongong in 2017, researching detector systems for high precision spectroscopy in fundamental physics.^[22] She is involved with several outreach and education activities.^[4][6]