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January 18, 2022

Stephanie Wissel has been selected for the Downsbrough Early Career Professor in Physics!

Stephanie Wissel has been selected for the Downsbrough Early Career Professor in Physics!

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Stephanie Wissel, assistant professor of physics and astronomy/astrophysics, has been selected for the Downsbrough Early Career Professor in Physics! Stephanie works in experimental astro-particle physics with expertise in the detection and study of cosmic neutrinos. She’s pursuing the discovery of cosmogenic and astrophysical neutrinos at ultra-high energies (greater than 100 PeV) using radio detection techniques. These experiments will provide unprecedented insight into Nature’s highest energy accelerators and into the physics of extreme environments such as pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, and active galactic nuclei. Stephanie also plays a key role in our department’s educational, service, and outreach missions, including taking leadership in our efforts to build an inclusive, diverse community of graduate students and postdocs. Please join us in congratulating Stephanie on this well-deserved honor!

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.