Alessandra Lanzara received her BA and PhD in physics from Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy in 1999 and was awarded the "Marcello Conversi Award" as Outstanding Thesis at the same University. She was a post-doc at Stanford University for three years :1999-2002. In 2002 she joined the physics Department faculty at UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor.

Awards and Honors include: David Shirley Award for "groundbreaking work measuring the electronic structure of graphene" ; Distinguished Women in Physics Lecture (2007); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Outstanding Performance Award (2005); Sloan Foundation Research Fellow (2004); Hellman Award (2004); National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award (2003-2008); W. McMillan Award (2003) for “the discovery of a universal energy scale in cuprate superconductors”; Research Fellow Award (A. della Riccia Foundation) (1999).

She is active inthe field of the electronic and magnetic properties and in the unusual electronic ground state in novel complex materials and nanostructures to reach a full understanding of the quantum theory of solids and to define new pathways for the fabrication of novel materials with desired properties.  She is a leader in a variety of experimental probes including Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES), Spin- Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (Spin-ARPES), Spin Polarized Low Energy Electron Microscopy (SPLEEM) and Inelastic X-ray Scattering (IXS).