Nikko Cleri

Nikko Cleri — Eberly Postdoctoral Fellow — Postdoc

Office: 520 Davey Laboratory

Address: 520 Davey Lab State College, PA 16802

njc5787@psu.edu

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Nikko Cleri

Astronomy Quasars IGC

Nikko Cleri is an observational astronomer who studies the evolution of black holes and stellar populations through cosmic time using spectroscopy from space-based observatories such as HST and JWST. He is particularly interested in the physical and chemical conditions of ionized gas in star forming regions and around accreting black holes, and how to diagnose the sources of ionizing photons in galaxies in the early Universe. He received his B.S. and M.S. at the University of Connecticut and Ph.D. at Texas A&M University, after which he joined as an Eberly Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State in the summer of 2024.

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ORCID: 0000-0001-7151-009X

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.