Alessandra Buonanno is a theoretical physicist. She is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, and head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department. She holds a College Park professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park, and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015.