Elena Aprile

Born on 12 March 1954 in Milan, Italy, Elena Aprile is an Italian particle physicist at Columbia University who leads the XENON dark-matter experiment. Aprile did her undergraduate work at the University of Naples and her graduate work at the University of Geneva, earning her PhD in 1982. She first became interested in particle detectors when she worked at CERN in the summer of 1977 building a liquid-argon detector under the supervision of fellow Italian particle physicist Carlo Rubbia, who became her doctoral thesis adviser. In 1983 she joined Rubbia as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, where she continued her liquid-argon research. In 1986 she joined the faculty of Columbia, becoming a full professor in 2001. At Columbia, Aprile switched to the study of liquid xenon as a more promising material for high-energy-particle detection and initiated the XENON experiment, located at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory deep beneath Italy’s Apennine Mountains. Since 2002 she and her team have been building ever-larger experiments using liquid xenon to search for weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, a leading dark-matter candidate. Aprile is a fellow of the American Physical Society, has served as an editor and reviewer of numerous scientific journals, and was codirector of the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory for six years. (Photo credit: XENON collaboration)

Date in History: 12 March 1954