Dr. Alessandra Aloisi
Program Scientist
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Dr. Alessandra Aloisi is a Program Scientist in the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters where she serves as Science Data officer and Open Science Implementation Officer. She is on a detail from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), where she is currently an Observatory Scientist.
From 2018 to 2024, Dr. Aloisi served as the Head of the Science Mission Office at STScI, where she supported the career development of more than 150 research staff members and postdoctoral researchers, oversaw the peer review process for orbit allocation of both the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, and was responsible for the institute’s library, conference attendance, visitor programs and internal grants. From 2017 to 2018, she served as the institute’s Deputy Mission Head of the Science Mission Office. Before this, Dr. Aloisi was the Deputy Division Head of the Operations and Engineering Division at STScI for several years, co-managing a group of more than 300 technical personnel, engineers, astronomers, and scientists who oversee the ground system efforts, including the planning and scheduling, integration and testing, and data management of the missions supported by STScI, including the Hubble, James Webb, and Roman Space Telescopes and the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.
Dr. Aloisi joined the STScI’s research staff in 2003, working first for the European Space Agency (ESA) and transferring to a position with the Association of the Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) in 2009. She started at STScI as an Instrument Scientist for Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), and became the Lead for the team responsible for the calibration, operations, and user support of these spectrographs just before Hubble’s fourth Servicing Mission. She launched her career as a postdoctoral researcher at STScI in 1999 before becoming a postdoctoral researcher in 2001 and then an associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University. She obtained her Ph.D. from Bologna University in Italy in 1999 in the area of resolved stellar populations and star-formation histories with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Throughout her career, Dr. Aloisi has planned, reduced, and interpreted data from an array of Hubble and more recently JWST instruments. She was also an expert user of the Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE). She has co-authored more than 300 articles. Dr. Aloisi also regularly presents at conferences, including the American Astronomical Society Meeting, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series, the IAU Symposium, and the SPIE Conference.
Her primary research interests include resolved stellar populations and star-formation histories of nearby star-forming galaxies and chemical abundances in their multi-phase interstellar medium. Her primary fields of technical expertise are in ultraviolet/optical spectroscopy and optical/near-infrared imaging/photometry with space-based telescopes, science with data archives, and optimization of science through technology leadership and management.