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Laurel Oneill

Laurel Oneill — Postdoctoral Scholar — Postdoc
Office: 428 Davey Laboratory
Address: 251 Pollock Rd, 525 Davey Lab, University park PA 16802
laurel@psu.edu
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Researcher standing behind a green bike, and in front of a silver pickup truck
Astronomy GRAND Cosmic Rays IGC

Dr. Laurel ONeill completed their PhD in electrical engineering at Penn State University in 2024. Their research explored both engineering education and applied spectroscopy for environmental and industrial applications. After completing their Phd, they transitioned into a postdoc position at Penn State in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics working separately under the direction of Dr. Abe Falcone and Dr. Stephanie Wissell. In this position Dr. ONeill researches techniques to improve the performance of X-ray detectors for space based telescopes, provides systems engineering expertise for spacecraft in development, and provides expertise in RF and antenna engineering. Their current work involves the localization of photon impacts on Hybrid-CMOS detectors (HCD) to provide sub-pixel event resolution to the Blackhole coded aperture Telescope (BlackCAT) CubeSat. They are also modeling and contributing antenn designs to the HERON observatory collaboration.

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.