Laura Donnay
Research interests: classical and quantum gravity, black holes, flat space holography, asymptotic symmetries, scattering amplitudes, gravitational waves.
Bio sketch: Laura Donnay was born in Liège (Belgium) in 1989. She obtained her PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2016, working on asymptotic symmetries of gravitational theories and their applications to holographic dualities. With support from the Belgian American Educational Foundation, she then moved to the United States to pursue a first postdoctoral position at Harvard University in the group of Andrew Strominger. She subsequently received a Black Hole Initiative Fellowship at Harvard and became a member of the newly founded interdisciplinary Black Hole Initiative. She returned to Europe in 2019 with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien). In 2022, she obtained an Assistant Professor position in the Theoretical Particle Physics group at SISSA, where she became Associate Professor in 2025. In September 2026, she will join UMONS as an FNRS Chargée de Recherches (tenured research position).
Laura Donnay has been awarded several prestigious individual prizes and grants, including the START Prize of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Wallenberg Academy Fellowship, and a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant funded by the European Commission.
Her research focuses on classical and quantum aspects of gravity, in particular on the emergence of infinite-dimensional symmetries at spacetime boundaries, such as in the near-horizon region of black holes or at the asymptotic boundary of flat spacetimes. By exploiting the powerful constraints implied by these symmetries, her research program aims to uncover a holographic description of gravity for realistic spacetimes (celestial/Carrollian holography), as well as to shed light on the quantum properties of black holes.
Selected publications:
- X. Bekaert, L. Donnay, Y. Herfray, BMS particles, Phys. Rev. Lett. 135 (2025) 13, 131602 [arXiv:2412.06002 [hep-th]].
- L. Donnay, A. Fiorucci, Y. Herfray, R. Ruzziconi, A Carrollian Perspective on Celestial Holography, Phys. Rev. Lett. 129 (2022) 7, 071602 [arXiv:2202.04702 [hep-th]].
- L. Donnay, C. Marteau, Carrollian Physics at the Black Hole Horizon, Class. Quant. Grav. 36 (2019) 16 [arXiv:1903.09654 [hep-th]].
- L. Donnay, A. Puhm, A. Strominger, Conformally Soft Photons and Gravitons, JHEP 01 (2019) 184 [arXiv:1810.05219 [hep-th]].
- L. Donnay, G. Giribet, H. A. Gonzalez, M. Pino, Supertranslations and superrotations at the horizon, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116 (2016) 091101 [arXiv:1511.08687 [hep-th]].
Contact
Université de Mons
Bâtiment de Vinci
Avenue Maistriau, 15
7000 Mons
laura.donnay@umons.ac.be
+32 (0)65 37XXXX