Irene Bolognino
A world atlas helped inspire Irene Bolognino to try to understand the world around her. After working on SABRE North, she is taking the next step in her pursuit of knowledge with SABRE South.
A career in physics can be competitive and demanding, so it would not be surprising for researchers to want to rest after a long day in the laboratory.
This is not the case for University of Adelaide postdoctoral researcher, Irene Bolognino, who decided to learn the notoriously difficult violin in her free time.
It is a sign of her determination that within eight years of picking up the instrument, she was playing as part of an orchestra in churches and schools in her original home country of Italy.
Bolognino says that alongside the demanding career pathway of academia, learning the violin was no walk in the park.
“It was very tough,” she said. “My teacher was 72 years old and he said that after 65 years playing the violin, he had only just started to play it well.”
She brings the same determination to her study of physics, which she set her sights on as a four-year-old growing up in Turin, in Italy’s north.
Bolognino remembers being fascinated by her parents’ Atlas and developing a sense of curiosity about space and the natural world.
“By the time that I was eight, I knew everything about the solar system and the planets,” she said.
As a 14-year-old, she spotted an advertisement for a prestigious science competition, which she cut out and pasted in a notebook.
Four years later, when she was old enough to participate, she entered and won.
The prize included spending a week at the Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory near Bologna.
From there, Bolognino knew that she had chosen the right path and embarked on a PhD in Astroparticle Physics followed by postdoctoral studies in Italy and France.
When she travelled to Australia for her honeymoon, she loved the country’s natural beauty and the friendliness of its people, and looked for a professional position working with SABRE South.
She had previously worked on the SABRE North experiment in Milan and thus she already knew the potential of the SABRE experiment.
Aside from her work on SABRE, Bolognino’s other research interests are neutrino physics, both sterile and solar neutrinos (the SOLID and the Borexino experiment), and cosmic-rays and gamma astronomy physics (the ARGO-YBJ and the LAGO experiment).
As one of the Centre’s Early Career Researcher representative in the Executive Committee, Bolognino aims to make a significant contribution to the Centre, to deepen its dynamics and to understand its workings.
In the future, she would also like to be involved in initiatives to create gender equity in physics. This is informed by her own experience in a previous role, where she felt undervalued as one of few women in her department.
“I would like to be the last person to have received that kind of experience, so if I can be involved in helping reduce the gender gap in academia then that is what I will do,” she said.
However, on the whole, working in physics has been a positive experience so far, and Bolognino is thrilled to be pursuing a childhood dream through her work with the Dark Matter Centre.
“It was always my dream to understand what’s around us, and how nature works. As a child I wanted to discover something great, and I might not, but even if SABRE doesn’t discover dark matter modulation, we will be making important steps forward in the search for dark matter,” she said.