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Stephen Kerby

Stephen Kerby — Graduate Student — Graduate Student
Office: 532C Davey Laboratory
Address: 525 Davey Laboratory
sek289@psu.edu
Stephen Kerby
Astronomy Quasars CMA

Welcome! I'm Steve Kerby, a graduate student here at the PSU Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. My research with Dr. Abe Falcone focuses on high-energy astronomy using observations from the Fermi and Swift space telescopes. Before arriving at PSU, I studied physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, graduating in 2019. I'm originally from Wheaton, a suburb of Chicago, incidentally the hometown of Edwin Hubble and Grote Reber (the father of radio astronomy).

Outside of my academic work, I spend time playing the bass, practicing martial arts, and hiking.

My research with Dr. Abe Falcone focuses on emission of pulsars, blazars, and other sources using survey data from the Fermi and Swift space telescopes. Examining the unassociated Fermi-LAT sources using follow-up Swift observations, I hope to build more complete samples of galactic and extra-galactic sources while examining in detail their spectra.

My other research collaborations include work in SETI, variable stars, and galactic halos.

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.