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April 6, 2026 – April 12, 2026

Announcements 4/6/2026

IGC apple Logo created by Monica Rincon Ramirez
• IGC ALL Meeting Monday, April 6, 2026, 2 – 3pm-538 Davey Lab

• Astro Lunch Talk
Tuesday, April 7, 2026, 12 – 1pm-538 Davey Lab
Speaker: Victor Liu, Penn State University
Title: Systematic Monitoring of Extreme X-ray Variability from Weak-line Quasars

• Astronomy and Astrophysics Colloquium Wednesday, April 8, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00pm, 538 Davey Laboratory – Lauren Weiss, University of Notre Dame
Title: The Origin of Earth: Lessons from Multi-Planet Systems

• Physics Colloquium Thursday, April 9, 2026, 3:30 – 4:30pm, 117 Osmond Laboratory Speaker – Margaret Murnane, University of Colorado
Title: Building the X-ray Microscopes of Tomorrow: From Star Wars to Quantum Sculpting

• Strong Gravity, April 10, 2026, 9:30am – 10:30am - 320 Whitmore Lab
Speaker: Debatri Chattopadhyay Northwestern University
Title: Black Hole Mergers in Dense Stellar Environments: From Hierarchical Growth to Gravitational Wave Signatures

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.