February 15, 2026 – February 22, 2026

Announcements

Announcements

• IGC Meeting
Monday, February 16, 2026, 2 – 3pm-538 Davey Lab

• Astro Lunch Talk
Tuesday, February 17, 2026, 12 – 1pm-538 Davey Lab
Speaker: Huihao Zhang, Penn State University
Title: Pushing the State of the Art in Near-Infrared Radial Velocity with the Habitable Zone Planer Finder: Monitoring the Stable Star Sigma Draconis

• Astronomy and Astrophysics Colloquium
Wednesday, February 18, 2026, 3:45 – 5pm 538 Davey Lab
Speaker - Anna de Graaff, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Title: The red and distant Universe revealed by JWST/NIRSpec

• Physics Colloquium
Thursday, February 19, 2026, 3:30 – 4:30pm, 117 Osmond Laboratory
Speaker – Greg Kestin, Harvard University
Title: "AI in Education - Present and Future"

Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.