Maria Charisi Receives International Recognition for Early-Career Achievements in STEM

Maria Charisi, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Washington State University, has received the 2024 L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Hellenic Award for Women in Science in the field of natural sciences. The prize is awarded to Greek women scientists under the age of 40 for their outstanding research contributions.

Dr. Charisi’s research primarily focuses on supermassive black holes. She currently spilts her time between Washington State University and the University of Crete, where she is completing a grant project to build a research group to study multi-messenger astrophysics. She plans to develop an exchange program to facilitate collaboration between her labs in Greece and Washington.

Prior to joining the Washington State University faculty last year, Dr. Charisi was a Vanderbilt Initiative for Data-intensive Astrophysics fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Earlier in her career, she was a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Charisi holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and her Ph.D. in astronomy from Columbia University in New York.