Brazilian woman wins one of the biggest science awards in the world

The capixaba Marcelle Soares is 37 years old, a woman and black. And, against many predictions that she would struggle to make it in academic and scientific circles, she became a professor of physics at a respected university in the United States and was chosen to receive a $70,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation — the same as 47 Nobel Prize winners have received.

Her Ph. North American Energy.

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Born in Vitória, Marcelle graduated in physics at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (Ufes) and completed her master’s and doctorate in astronomy at the University of São Paulo (USP). Currently, as we said, she is a professor at Brandeis University in the United States.

She is also the only Brazilian among the 16 research leaders at Fermilab, one of the most renowned research centers in particle physics, which helped to detect a neutron star merger for the first time.

The so-called ‘dark energy’ is one of the great mysteries in current physics. All that is known is that it causes the universe to expand. It is known that the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang, but it was discovered a few years ago that this expansion is accelerating. The great mystery is where does the energy to produce this expansion come from? This invisible energy is the subject of his research.

Her project tries to understand dark energy, and the method she uses is mapping an area corresponding to 25% of the sky. The Brazilian researcher evaluates millions of galaxies in this mapping process.

Marcelle looks for light associated with gravitational wave events. To date, no one has ever observed these events, which are produced from collisions of neutron stars or collisions between a neutron star and a black hole.

Last month (February), as we said, Marcelle was chosen to receive one of the most prestigious grants available to early career researchers, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, based in New York. The prize, as we said, is 70 thousand dollars, which must be directed towards further research.

So what do you think of women researchers? Do you know any?

And how to encourage the emergence of new ‘Marcelles?’

Tell me here in the comments 😊