Elena Cuoco

Elena Cuoco
Alma mater	University of Pisa
Scientific career
Institutions	European Gravitational Observatory University of Bologna
Thesis	Identificazione dello spettro di rumore di virgo e metodi di rivelazione dei segnali gravitazionali (1997)

Elena Cuoco is an Italian astrophysicist and the Head of Data Science at the European Gravitational Observatory. Cuoco develops machine learning approaches for gravitational wave research. She was part of the team who won the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. She is a Professor of Gravitational Wave Astrophysics at the University of Bologna.

Early life and education

Cuoco became interested in science as a child, and enjoyed imagining the universe when she stared at the dark night sky. She became interested in physics at high school, and eventually studied statistical analysis and astrophysics at university. As a physics student she had a professor “who said that women’s minds were different from men’s, so they were less suited to science”. She started a doctoral fellowship at the University of Pisa, where worked on the Virgo experiment.

Research and career

Cuoco is an expert in noise analysis. Astronomical telescopes collect information from astrophysical phenomena, e.g. the coalescence of binary stars and collapse of massive stars, alongside 'glitches' (noise) – spikes of intensity that occur due to transient noise over a short time. Cuoco develops protocols to remove very faint astrophysical signals from very large noise. She worked on noise analysis for the Virgo interferometer, where she developed analytical algorithms and machine learning that leans the features of noise signals and removes them. She was made responsible for training early career researchers in gravitational wave science. She wrote a textbook on Gravitational Wave Science with Machine Learning to improve gravitational wave data analysis. Cuoco developed a COST Action Programme on Gravitational Waves and Machine Learning.

Cuoco was one of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics laureates in 2017. In 2018 Cuoco was made Head of Data Science at the European Gravitational Observatory.

She moved to the University of Bologna in 2024, where she worked on the application of artificial intelligence for detector characterisation. She is responsible for the data analysis platform for the Einstein Telescope. For the Einstein Telescope Cuoco developed data quality assessments and strategies to identify and eliminate noise.

Select publications

• B.P. Abbott; R. Abbott; T.D. Abbott; et al. (5 February 2017). "Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger". Centennial of General Relativity: 291–311. Bibcode:2017cgrc.book..291A. doi:10.1142/9789814699662_0011. Wikidata Q57561978.
• B P Abbott; R Abbott; T D Abbott; et al. (15 June 2016). "GW151226: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a 22-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence". Physical Review Letters. 116 (24): 241103. arXiv:1606.04855. Bibcode:2016PhRvL.116x1103A. doi:10.1103/PHYSREVLETT.116.241103. ISSN 0031-9007. PMID 27367379. Wikidata Q28276820.
• B. P. Abbott; R. Abbott; T. D. Abbott; et al. (4 September 2019). "GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs". Physical Review X. 9 (3). arXiv:1811.12907. doi:10.1103/PHYSREVX.9.031040. ISSN 2160-3308. Wikidata Q107107693.