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July 1, 2020 outreach

IGC celebrated its silver jubilee through an international conference igc@25

The multimessenger universe which was held at Penn State from June 23rd to 27th 2019. The scientific program has a dual goal: to assess the current status of our field in broad terms and to discuss future directions. The plenary talks by leading experts provided a broad overview of the field, with emphasis on developments that have occurred in the past ~25 years, while panels focused on developments over the past decade and, especially, the vision for the next decade or two. The after dinner speech, entitled “Multimessenger Astronomy and the Big Questions of the Cosmos: A Billion Light year View”, was given by the NSF Director Dr. France Cordova.

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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.