Antonia Gambacorta, an Italian scientist, was awarded the Robert H. Goddard Award given by Nasa for research in science. Gambacorta's research, in particular, is in the area of infrared and microwave sensing techniques as well as inverse methods for recovering temperature and atmospheric constituents and climate feedbacks on greenhouse gases.

She received a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Bari in 1998, a master's degree in atmospheric physics from the University of Maryland in 2005 and a Ph.D. three years later from the same university, where she taught for more than 15 years. Since 2020, she has been a scientist, physicist and researcher at the Climate and Radiation Laboratory at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center.