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.