Maria SIMIONESCU Astrofizician Associate Professor at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)

Aurora is an astrophysicist originally from Braila, Romania, currently working as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Before that, she was an International Top Young Fellow also at JAXA, and an Einstein Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University. She obtained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. Her main research interests are related to high-energy astronomy, and particularly the physics of the hot plasma in clusters of galaxies, the largest virialized objects in the universe.