A/Prof Elisabete da Cunha is a Portuguese-Australian astrophysicist and a Principal Research Fellow at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at the University of Western Australia. She was born in Paris and raised in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, from age 7. She obtained her honours degree in Physics/Applied Mathematics (Astronomy) at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto in 2005, and her doctorate from the University of Paris (Pierre & Marie Curie) in 2008. After that, she held several post-doctoral research appointments in Greece, Germany, and Australia. She has been in Australia since 2014, having lived in Melbourne and Canberra before settling in Perth in 2019. She held a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and was an ASTRO-3D ARC Centre for Excellence Senior Research Fellow.

 

Elisabete has been named a "Highly Cited Researcher" by Clarivate in 2023 and 2025, and awarded WA Portuguese Citizen of the Year in 2023 by the Portuguese Community Council of WA. In 2024, she was a Finalist for WA Mid-Career Scientist of the Year at the Premier's Science Awards, and a Winner of the UWA Vice-Chamcellor's Mid-Career Research Award.

 

Elisabete’s scientific research aims to understand how galaxies such as our own Milky Way have formed and evolved in the Universe in the last 13 billion years. Specifically, she combines observations of galaxies with the world’s largest telescopes with theoretical models to measure the physical properties of the most distant galaxies in the Universe. Elisabete has developed a widely-used tool (MAGPHYS) that allows astronomers to derive physical properties such as stellar mass, star formation rate, and interstellar dust content from observations of galaxies across the spectrum from the ultraviolet to the far-infrared/sub-millimetre. She is also interested in how interstellar dust forms and evolves in galaxies across cosmic time, and has recently been using the world's most powerful sub-millimetre telescope, ALMA, to address this question.

 

Besides research and teaching/mentoring graduate students, Elisabete also has a passion for sharing her science with the public and encouraging young students to pursue science studies. She has organized and participated in various public outreach events in Portugal and Australia. In 2019 she co-chaired a simposium of the International Astronomical Union in her home town of Viana do Castelo on "Uncovering early galaxy evolution in the ALMA and JWST era", an event in which over 170 professional astronomers from all over the world participated, and that included several outreach events for the local population.