Giulia Isabella

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA; USA) 

Unveiling black hole scattering: analytic and causal structures in gravitational EFTs 

2026–2027: 12 months

Giulia Isabella is a theoretical physicist working at the interface of particle physics and gravity. Before joining the Italian Academy, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Université Paris-Saclay and previously completed a joint master’s degree in high-energy physics at ETH Zurich and École Polytechnique. 

A central aspect of her work is the use of general principles, such as causality and consistency, to constrain physical theories. She is particularly interested in applying these ideas to gravitational waves and black hole physics. Her recent work has uncovered new mathematical aspects of how gravity behaves in scattering processes and has led to high-precision results in determining black hole Love numbers, which describe how black holes respond to external perturbations.