TEAMSKA
DR ANNA BONALDI SKAO Project Scientists have a multi-faceted role, working closely with the SKA engineering and science communities to prepare for construction and operation of the telescopes while conducting and publishing their own astronomy research. Dr Anna Bonaldi, from Italy, is a cosmologist based at SKAO Global HQ in the UK. A co-lead of the SKA Science Data Challenge 2 and part of the committee organising the 2021 SKA Science Meeting, Anna is also involved in five of the SKA Science Working Groups and regularly takes part in outreach activities for the general public. To mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2021, she spoke to us about how she found a love for astronomy, what it takes to work in a major international collaboration like the SKA, and how she’s used the COVID-19 lockdowns to perfect her pizza skills. Tell us about your early life, Anna. Where did you grow up? I grew up in a relatively small village near Venice in Italy. I’ve got a twin sister and it was funny because in the village everyone knows everybody, but nobody could distinguish me and my sister. They just called us “the twins”.
When you think of yourself as an individual that’s a bit frustrating! We took quite different career paths though, as she studied languages and I went into science. When did science become something you wanted to pursue? I was in a secondary school which focused on humanities, so not really on a science path, but in one class we did a topic on the planets and gravity, and for some reason this really caught my interest. I started reading a bit more around astronomy in the school library and I decided this was much more interesting than what I was doing! It was my last year before university, so it was a late decision but I really found a love for it and I knew I could do it with a bit of patience. I went on to study astronomy at the University of Padua, not far from Venice. So it wasn’t based on a long-held fascination with the night sky? It’s a bit of a disappointing answer, but
no! In my first year at university there were two kinds of people: one who for years had been looking at the stars through their telescopes, who had a lot of general astronomical knowledge. The other kind – people like me – liked the subject from a more abstract, almost philosophical point of view. Cosmology is about understanding the birth and evolution of the Universe and eventually its fate, so it’s sort of “who are we, where do we come from?” That is where my fascination lies. What does cosmology research involve? Instead of studying objects in isolation, you try to build a bigger “probe”. So for example you can use all the galaxies to trace the distribution of matter or of gravity in a big area. These spots of light, instead of informing us about that object in particular, inform us about the volume of the Universe that we are seeing and the forces at work. We believe if you “zoom out” of the Universe far enough it is relatively
Left: Anna (right) as a youngster with her identical twin sister Elisa. 33
