Speakers
Check out our list of esteemed and engaging speakers!
National CUWiP Keynote Speaker
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala (MIT)
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala joined the Physics faculty at MIT in January 2002.
Before that, she was a postdoctoral associate and then a research scientist at Caltech, working on the Laser Interferometric
Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). She has been involved with LIGO since her early years in graduate school at MIT and
her primary research has been in instrument development for interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. She was
appointed Associate Department Head of Physics, effective February 1, 2015.
CUWiP at UCLA Invited Speakers
Prof. Nadya Mason (U Illinois, Urbana Champaign)
Prof. Nadya Mason Professor Mason's research at Illinois focuses on how electrons behave in low-dimensional,
correlated materials, where enhanced interactions are expected to give novel results. The research is relevant to a variety
of technologies, including quantum communication, information storage, and qubit control in quantum computers. Prof.
Mason's current research focuses on the electronic behavior of materials such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, topological
insulators, nanostructured superconductors, and other novel 1D or 2D systems.
Dr. Amy Mainzer (JPL)
Dr. Amy Mainzer earned her B.S. in Physics at Stanford University with honors in 1995, her M.S. in Astronomy at
the California Institute of Technology in 2001, and her Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003.
Dr. Mainzer, now at the at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is principal investigator of the NEOWISE project, the asteroid-hunting
portion of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. Her research interests include asteroids, comets, brown dwarfs,
planetary atmospheres, and design and construction of novel instrumentation for ground and space.
Prof. Andrea Ghez (UCLA)
Prof. Andrea Ghez received a B.S. (1987) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S. (1989) and Ph.D. (1992)
from the California Institute of Technology. She is currently a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA. Ghez received a MacArthur
"genius grant" in 2008 for her work in surmounting the limitations of earthbound telescopes. She developed a
technique known as speckle imaging, which combined many short exposures from a telescope into one much-crisper image. Recently she's
been using adaptive optics to further sharpen our view from here and compile evidence of young stars at the center of the universe.
