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May 2, 2025

Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos to host alumni and friends reunion event

Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos to host alumni and friends reunion event

The Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos is hosting an Alumni and Friends Reunion on May 30-31 at the Hyatt meeting room in State College, Pennsylvania. This event will feature presentations by several postdoctoral scholar alumni, networking opportunities, panel discussions, and a showcase of new developments and initiatives at the IGC.

“We are thrilled to welcome back alums and friends of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, including six people whose time at Penn State collectively spanned the last three decades,” said Sarah Shandera, director of the IGC and professor of physics. “All of them were here as postdoctoral researchers—a career stage when people have the expertise and time to develop new ideas, and when they also serve as the glue in a research group, connecting busy faculty and mentoring graduate students.”

Speakers include:
Robin Tuluie (IGC postdoc, 1993-1995), previous head of R&D at Renault F1 (engine design); founder PhysicsX
Tristan McLoughlin (IGC postdoc, 2005-2007), professor of pure and applied mathematics, Trinity College Dublin
Darren Grant (IGC postdoc, 2007-2009), Canada Excellence Research Chair, Simon Fraser University (to be confirmed)
Gordana Tešic (IGC postdoc, 2012-2017), data scientist at Meta, Ottawa
Jonathan Trump (IGC postdoc, 2013-2016), associate professor of physics, U. Connecticut
Surabhi Sachdev (IGC postdoc, 2018-2020), assistant professor of physics, Georgia Tech
“We are delighted to showcase their roles as key drivers in our research ecosystem as well as their accomplishments,” Shandera said. “Each of our keynote speakers went on to do really interesting and impactful things in industry or academia, and we are excited to hear their stories! Their talks will anchor the reunion’s program of networking and discussion, including updates on how the Institute is adapting to better serve its members.”

Please sign up to attend by May 10. A virtual option will be available for portions of the program.

More information about event is available on the IGC website, with an updated program coming soon. Questions can be directed to Courtney Shaffer as cls6664@psu.edu.

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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.