THE COURAGE TO DREAM | Elena Aprile

This evening is part of the new series, The Courage to Dream
Dark Matter: the glue that holds the Universe together

Dark Matter makes 85% of the matter in the Universe yet its nature remains a mystery despite ongoing efforts with a variety of experiments on Earth and in space.  An answer to this fundamental question will revolutionize physics and cosmology. A most promising approach is to directly detect a Dark Matter signal in an ultra-low background terrestrial detector. Among dark matter direct detection experiments, those based on liquid xenon imaging technology have shown to be the most sensitive and continue to lead the field.

I will focus on the XENON Dark Matter Project which I founded and which is carried out at the Italian Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory, by an international collaboration of almost 200 researchers.

Biography:

Professor Elena Aprile  is a Centennial Professor of Physics and, since July 2025, Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. She is an experimental physicist recognized worldwide for her pioneering work with liquid xenon imaging detectors and their application in astrophysics and dark matter direct detection. She is the founder and spokesperson for the XENON project which has been at the forefront of the field for more than fifteen years, with groundbreaking results which have constrained a variety of dark matter models. Aprile was born in Milano, Italy. She received the “Laurea” in physics from the University of Naples, Italy and the PhD in physics from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She was a postdoctoral schlar at Harvard University before joining the physics faculty at Columbia Universoty. She also received a Doctor of Philosophy degree “honoris causa” from Stockholm University. Professor Aprile is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a memeber of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She is the 2019 recipient of the Lancelot Berkley Prize of the Astronomical Society and the 2021 recipient of the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society.