Lilia Ferrario
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Lilia Ferrario is an Italian and Australian applied mathematician and theoretical astrophysicist. She is a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) and director of the ANU Mathematical Sciences Institute.[1]
Ferrario's research concerns stars with powerful rotating magnetic fields, including white dwarfs, pulsars, neutron stars, and magnetars.[2][3] Her work has also helped explain the processes through which white dwarfs accrete matter from companion stars and eventually become Type Ia supernovae,[4] and determined that much of the antimatter in the Milky Way comes from a more unusual type of supernova in which two orbiting white dwarfs collide.[5]
Education and career
Ferrario is originally from Bologna.[6] After graduating from the University of Bologna,[3] Ferrario completed her Ph.D. in 1989, at the Australian National University. Her dissertation, Accretion Processes in AM Herculis Systems, was jointly supervised by Dayal Wickramasinghe and Ian Tuohy.[7][8]
She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leicester in the UK, before returning to Australia to take up a research fellow position at the Australian National University,[3] in the early 1990s.[6] She headed the ANU Department of Mathematics from 2012 until 2014.[9] In 2021, after "more than 25 years of experience as an academic at MSI", she was named the director of the Mathematical Sciences Institute.[3]