Marie Anne Bizouard elected as spokesperson of Virgo: she will be the first woman in this role

Marie Anne Bizouard, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Nice, has been elected as the new spokesperson for the Virgo scientific collaboration, with effect on May 3rd. She is the first woman appointed in this role, since the Collaboration foundation in the late 1980s.
This international scientific collaboration, comprising over 1,000 researchers from 20 different countries, operates and analyses data from Virgo, the only European gravitational-wave detector and one of only four in the world, located in Italy in the countryside of Pisa. The new spokesperson, who will be responsible for the scientific coordination of the collaboration and for representing it externally, was appointed last week by the international representatives of the Virgo scientific groups and her mandate will begin on May 3rd. She will succeed Gianluca Gemme, a researcher at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), who has led the collaboration for the past three years.

“It is an extraordinary honour and a privilege for me to represent such a large and dedicated scientific collaboration working on one of the most cutting-edge and fascinating topics in physics today,” said Marie Anne Bizouard. “I feel the responsibility that comes from Virgo’s history and the scientific results it has achieved to date, and I will do my utmost, using all the tools at our disposal, to ensure that Virgo and our community continue to produce great science in the future. I would also like to thank my colleagues and all the scientific groups within the Collaboration for the trust they have placed in me.”

“I am very pleased to pass the baton to Marie Anne. Her deep knowledge of the Virgo experiment – said Gianluca Gemme –  her long experience in data analysis, and her leadership within the collaboration make her the ideal person to guide Virgo through this exciting phase. I wish her every success.”

Virgo is a gravitational interferometer with two three-kilometre arms stretching across the Pisa countryside and is capable of detecting gravitational waves. These are very faint cosmic signals that allow us to observe extraordinary phenomena in the deep Universe, such as the merger of black holes or stars. The Virgo interferometer operates in conjunction with the two US detectors, LIGO, and the Japanese detector, KAGRA, forming an international network that has observed more than 300 gravitational signals to date, giving rise to the new field of gravitational astronomy. 

Marie Anne Bizouard joined the Virgo Collaboration in 1998 and has been involved in many different aspects of gravitational wave research: from the early stages of Virgo’s construction to data analysis. For several years she worked on the commissioning of the Virgo detector, focusing in particular on the detector control systems.
She then joined one of the working groups searching for transient gravitational wave sources that are poorly modelled, such as core-collapse supernovae and developed the first analysis pipelines for the search for transient signals in the data produced by Virgo and LIGO. For many years, Marie Anne Bizouard examined Virgo data, laying the foundations for the Virgo group responsible for understanding detector noise. She co-coordinated the data analysis council within the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration and co-led several other working groups within the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration. She conducted numerous investigations into transient sources, both in association with and independent of electromagnetic emissions, alongside her students. Finally, since 2020, she has been in charge of the Virgo group at the Artemis laboratory of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur – CNRS – Université Côte d’Azur, which is responsible for providing an ultra-stable laser source.