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Visitor Info

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Traveling to IGC

The Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos is in Whitmore Laboratory on the University Park Campus of Penn State. Here is the Penn State campus map showing Whitemore Lab.

State College (the town surrounding Penn State's University Park) is located in
Central Pennsylvania and is approximately three hours by car from Pittsburgh,
Baltimore, Philadelphia and Ithaca, four hours from Princeton, four and a half
hours from New York City and Washington, D.C., and five hours from Syracuse.

To learn more about the downtown see State College.com

Air

University Park airport (airport code SCE) services State College and the
surrounding community. Three major carriers offer service from University Park
Airport: USAir from Philadelphia, United Airlines from Washington, D.C. and
Northwest Airlines from Detroit. For additional information on University Park
Airport, please visit: University Park Airport
Information. The University Park
Airport is located 5.5 miles from the Penn State’s University Park Campus. Car
rental is also available from University Park Airport through Avis, Hertz and
National Car Rental.Train

State College can be reached comfortably by Amtrak train to the Lewistown
station from New York, Princeton, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There is one
arrival and departure each day. Lewistown is approximately 40 minutes from
State College. It is possible to take a taxi from Lewistown to State College
and the cost is approximately $60.00 (USD) one-way.

Bus

Bus service by Greyhound or MegaBus is available from Pittsburgh and
Philadelphia to State College. Please see their websites for schedule
information or to make reservations.

Taxi

There are taxi services available in State College:

Driving

To obtain directions from your location to University Park, Pennsylvania (zip code: 16802)

Parking on the Penn State University Park Campus

All visitors who wish to park on campus must have a parking permit. Permits can be obtained from the Penn State Parking Office (814-863-1436) located on the ground-level of the Eisenhower Parking Deck or from the Centre County/Penn State Visitor Center located at 800 East Park Avenue; 814-231-8123.

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.