Skip to main content
April 7, 2023 priority

5th IGC Neighborhood Workshop held in State College

5th IGC Neighborhood Workshop held in State College

The 5th Annual IGC Neighborhood Workshop, an event for physicists in the local region around Penn State, was held downtown and in the Alumni Center. Faculty, postdocs and grad students, many from Penn State, gave brief talks and interacted with other groups in the immediate vicinity (A ~three hour drive) of State College. Participants included physicists from:
Carnegie Mellon University
Case Western Reserve University
CMU
Cornell University
Johns Hopkins University
Lehigh University
Penn State University
Space Telescope Science Institute
Syracuse University
University at Buffalo
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
West Virginia University
Thank you to everyone who came out!

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.