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February 9, 2021 outreach

Professor Stephanie Wissel’s Antarctic balloon mission was chosen for NASA Pioneers program

Professor Stephanie Wissel’s Antarctic balloon mission was chosen for NASA Pioneers program

Professor Wissel and her team in the IGC will search for the highest energy neutrinos using the long duration balloon experiment, PUEO, flown in Antarctica. PUEO is the first and only balloon payload to date selected for the new NASA Pioneers program. As Dr. Thomas H. Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate of the new program, put it, “These concept studies bring innovative, out-of-the-box thinking to the problem of how to do high-impact astrophysics experiments on a small budget.”

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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.