Pupa Gilbert
Pupa Gilbert is an American biophysicist and geobiologist. She has been pioneering synchrotron spectromicroscopy methods since 1989, and she continues to use and develop them today. Since 2004 she has focused on biomineralization in sea urchins, mollusk shells, and tunicates. She and her group are frequent users of the Berkeley-Advanced Light Source. Biography. She was born and raised in Rome, Italy; her previous name was Gelsomina De Stasio. She was a staff scientist at the Italian National Research Council (Istituto di Struttura della Materia) and at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. In 1999 she moved to  the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a full professor in the Department of Physics. She has honorary appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Materials Science. She is a Knight of her native Italy (2001), a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS-DCMP, 2010), and a Radcliffe Fellow (2014-2015). She was chair of the APS Division of Biological Physics (DBIO, 2010-2014), won many national and international awards including: Romnes 2002, Vilas 2006, Hamel 2008, and Chancellor Distinguished Teaching Award 2011 at UW-Madison; The Outstanding Young Persons of the World (TOYP-JCI, 1997), the American Competitiveness  and Innovation Award (ACI-NSF, 2008); the Best University Research Award (DOE-BES-Geosciences, 2011), the Science-NSF Visualizations Challenge] (2012). She teaches Physics in the Arts, for which she wrote a textbook, co-authored by Willy Haeberli and published by Academic Press-Elsevier (2008, 2011) and translated into Chinese (2011).