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February 2, 2026 – February 8, 2026

Announcements

Announcements
• IGC ALL Meeting
Monday, February 2, 2026, 2 – 3pm-538 Davey Lab
The agenda will include:
• Introductions of new members (bring any new group members you have)
• Reminder about funds to bring in postdoc candidates/new hires for a visit
• Reminder of upcoming IGC events
• Updates on planned spring activities from the Focus Initiatives

• Astro Lunch Talk
Tuesday, February 3, 2026, 12 – 1pm-538 Davey Lab
Speaker: Nolan McPhaul, Penn State University
Title: Stretchy Gratings: Fabricating a Custom-Groove-Patterned Grating by Manipulating Parallel-Groove Patterns

• Astronomy and Astrophysics Colloquium
Wednesday, February 4, 2026, 3:45 – 5pm 538 Davey Lab
Speaker - Olivia Cooper, University of Colorado, Boulder
Title: Observing Cosmic Assembly from Gigaparsec to Micron Scales

• Physics Colloquium
Thursday, February 5, 2026, 3:30 – 4:30pm, 117 Osmond Laboratory
Speaker – David Mandrus, The University of Tennessee Knoxville
Title: The Search for New Materials
About our wordmark
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.