September 14, 2021 outreach

Event to Commemorate 3 Decades of IGC

On September 14, 2021, IGC held an event to commemorate Professor Abhay Ashtekar's tenure as the founding Director of the institute which he has led with great vision for almost three decades. During this period, the institute has grown enormously and has had great impact on generations of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty. Several speakers at the event gave tribute to Abhay's leadership in making IGC an international leader in several areas in Fundamental Physics, Theoretical and Observational Cosmology, and Multi-messenger Astrophysics. The meeting culminated with a short talk by Abhay on his recollections of how the institute was founded, transformations it has undergone and its impact on science and the role played by staff in maintaining a great atmosphere.

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.