Elena Orlando is a full member of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), lunched in 2008 and which is still taking wonderful data. The image below shows the gamma-ray sky in Galactic coordinates as seen by Fermi LAT.

The image contains gamma-ray sources (the brithest points), while most of the emission detected by Fermi LAT is of diffuse origin. This diffuse emission can be produced by one of the three sources: (1) Cosmic Rays (CRs) interacting with the interstellar medium and the magnetic fields (B-fields), which is truly diffuse; (2) unresolved sources, which appear to be diffuse due to limited instrumental resolution; (3) annihilation of dark matter, which is expected to be also diffuse. With the advent of very sensitive telescopes the diffuse emission from the Milky Way has received renewed attention. I care about diffuse emission for both of its two proprieties: - Diffuse emission as confusing foreground for many analyses; - Diffuse emission as a useful tool for understanding CRs and B-fields. The two properties of the Galactic diffuse emission can be expanded as: 1) Diffuse emission as confusing foreground. Important studies and discoveries in gamma rays in the past decade had to face the uncertainties due to the Galactic diffuse emission. Indeed, Fermi-LAT detects ~80% of the photons of diffuse origin (see our work Ackermann et al. 2012), which is described with large uncertainty at present, and that makes searches for Dark Matter difficult to pursuit (see e.g. our recent work Ackermann et al. 2017). The effect is that many astrophysical discoveries are not accessible even when there are no instrumental limitations. 2) Diffuse emission as a tool. Galactic diffuse emission is associated to CRs, B-fields, and the interstellar medium. These quantities are still uncertain. However, as CRs propagate throughout the Milk Way, they leave a fundamental footprint behind: it is the radiation produced by their interactions with B-fields, gas, and interstellar photon field. Hence, observations of this diffuse emission are powerful tools to provide information on the interstellar medium and to understand origin and distribution of CRs, and Galactic B-fields. More details are reported in the next sections.
She is working on improving our knowledge of the diffuse emission by modeling its single components. Moreover, she is interested in undestanding the gamma-ray sources.
In this context she analyzes and interprets gamma-ray data from Fermi LAT, INTEGRAL, COMPTEL, and makes predictions for e-ATSROGAM, GAMMA-400, Compair, CTA.