Before coming to CISAC, Dr. Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago got her physics Ph.D. at Columbia University working on astronomical instrumentation under a NASA FINESST fellowship. Born and raised in Brazil, she got her BS in physics at Yale, after which she worked at MIT’s Nobel-Prize-winning LIGO lab and got her master’s at Columbia. She was one of the inaugural fellows of the Next-Generation Fellowship from the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, and received the 2021 American Physical Society 5 Sigma Physicist Award for congressional advocacy in nuclear disarmament.

Before starting her post-doc, Bárbara did research in a variety of fields, from particle and atomic physics to quantum optics and astronomical instrumentation. Her CISAC post-doc research, however, focuses on how to identify dual-purpose research developed by academics/civilians but of military interest, especially in the physical sciences, as a means to help on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear threat reduction initiatives.