Samaya Michiko Nissanke is an astrophysicist and the spokesperson for the GRAPPA Centre for Excellence in Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics at the University of Amsterdam. She works on gravitational-wave astrophysics and has played a founding role in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy. She was a pivotal figure in the discovery paper of the first binary neutron star merger, GW170817, seen in gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.
Nissanke was born in London to a Sri-Lankan father and a Japanese mother. She completed her Bachelor's and Master's degree in Physics at the University of Cambridge. She joined the Paris Observatory for her postgraduate studies. Nissanke earned her PhD in analytical relativity at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris in 2007 with a thesis titled Aspects théoriques de la forme des ondes gravitationnelles pour les phases spiralante et de fusion des systèmes binaires compacts (Theoretical aspects of the shape of gravitational waves for the spiraling and merging phases of compact binary systems).