Giulia Manca

The ScienzaSocietàScienza Association awards the 2022 Woman of Science Award to Professor Giulia Manca for her research activity testified by hundreds of scientific publications in the field of particle physics, an activity she has carried out and is carrying out at Fermilab in Chicago and at CERN in Geneva ; for having won, in 2015, a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council, the European Union institution which finances excellent researchers, and having access to a permanent position as professor in any Italian university and in many European universities, has chosen Sardinia, making an important contribution to the research and development of University of Cagliari, INFN and the Sardinia Region; for her attention to the intermediation between research and dissemination of science and to the problem of gender equality.

Giulia Manca, after graduating in physics from the University of Cagliari, obtained a PhD from the University of Oxford. She was then a fellow of The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) with the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool and a guest scientist for eight years at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago, USA. She became a fixed-term researcher in Cagliari and was a simil-fellow at CERN and in Paris Orsay at the CNSR (National Research Council in France), she won a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council in France which then led her to win by call direct the position of Associate Professor at the University of Cagliari. This is a very important and prestigious recognition, the first, and for now the only, ERC Consolidator Grant in Sardinia. In the meantime she has participated and won other international grants (in particular for the Horizon 2020 program) and continues to work, as an associate at INFN, CERN and FermiLab and collaborates with physicists from all over the world, as well as being part of various groups of work in UniCA and of the academic senate of the university.
Her name appears in the ranking of the Top Italian Scientists of the VIA Academy, a census of scientists and scholars with the greatest impact, measured with the H-index value, which represents a number that encompasses the productivity and impact of cultural or scientific production of a teacher, based on the citations received. Furthermore, she is on the list of 100 experts in the STEM area, drawn up and published in the book “100 women against stereotypes for Science”, edited by Luisella Seveso and Giovanna Pezzuoli for Gi.U.Li.A. journalists.