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February 23, 2026 – March 1, 2026

Announcements

Announcements
• IGC Meeting
Monday, February 23, 2026, 2 – 3pm-538 Davey Lab

• Astro Lunch Talk
Tuesday, February 24, 2026, 12 – 1pm-538 Davey Lab
Speaker: Yujia Wei, Penn State University
Title: TBD

• Astronomy and Astrophysics Colloquium
Wednesday, February 25, 2026, 3:45 – 5pm 538 Davey Lab
Speaker - Krista Lynne Smith, Texas A&M University
Title: Space-Time Through the Kaleidoscope: Time Domain and Multiwavelength Studies of Supermassive Black Holes

• Physics Colloquium
Thursday, February 26, 2026, 3:30 – 4:30pm, 117 Osmond Laboratory
Speaker – Dan Hooper, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title: "Dark Matter and the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess"
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.