Nabila Aghanim receives the CNRS Silver Medal
Nabila Aghanim, CNRS Directeur de Recherche at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay has just received the CNRS Silver Medal, a distinction, which « honours every year researchers for the originality, the quality, and the significance of their work, recognised both in France and internationally, contributing thus to the influence of the CNRS and to the excellence of French research »
Reaching the CNRS as Chargée de Recherche at IAS in 1999, Nabila Aghanim is a cosmologist who majored in the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background and its use in constraining and understanding the processes leading to the formation of grand structures in the universe (galaxies and galaxy clusters). She played a major role in the scientific preparation of the Planck ESA mission, in which the laboratory was responsible for the High Frequency Instrument (HFI) development. She coordinated all the scientific activities linked with secondary anisotropy studies (mainly Sunyaev – Zel’dovich effect and galaxy clusters), which led to the publication of about 40 papers on the subject within the consortium. At the same time, she is strongly involved in the preparation of future observation tools for the community, such as the DUNE and Euclid projects, the key-projects of LOFAR, or (more recently) the PIXIE project - in collaboration with NASA - for which she is co-PI and French representative. She has just received an “advanced” ERC grant.
In parallel to her remarkable research activities, Nabila Aghanim is involved at the heart of the community: she is Managing Editor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, one of the references for the European and international astrophysical community, and has just been nominated as Director of the Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers Paris-Sud.
Image : © ESA