Annalisa Buffa is a professor of Mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) since 2016 and, prior to this, she has been the director and a research director of the Instituto di Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie informatiche of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). Corresponding member of the Accademia dei Lincei, foreign member of the Académie des Sciences, and member of Academia Europaea, 

Since 2023, she is Associate Vice President for postgraduate education at EPFL. 

Annalisa Buffa is a leading expert in the numerical analysis of partial differential equations. Her interests span from geometric design, computational mechanics, and computational electromagnetics to approximation theory, and functional analysis for PDEs. She received an ERC Starting grant in 2008, and an ERC Advanced grant in 2016, she is a recipient of the Collatz prize from the ICIAM (2015) and she is the 2023  Sonia Kovalevsky lecturer.

 She has been a plenary speaker at several venues, including the ECCOMAS conference in 2022, AIMS Conference on Dynamical Systems, Differential Equations and Applications in 2018, the International Congress of Mathematicians (section 15, 2014), the ICIAM in 2015, the GAMM conference and the FoCM conferences in 2014. Annalisa Buffa is a highly cited researcher, according to ISI (2019).