University of Chicago Postdoctoral Fellow Will Speak on “Mapping the Universe from Antarctica” Monday

Kim Coble, National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago and an instructor at Adler Planetarium, will give a talk on “Mapping the Universe from Antarctica” noon Monday in Gagnon Lecture Hall, Hugel Science Center room 100.

The lecture is sponsored by the Physics Club, which will provide free pizza and drinks.

The talk description: “The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which formed when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old, is one of the most important lines of evidence for the Big Bang theory. Observations of the CMB, including ones made from Antarctica, can be used to test models of how large-scale structures formed and to answer questions about the nature of our universe.”

Coble, who has conducted research at the South Pole, earned a Ph.D. (1999) and M.S. (1994) at the University of Chicago in astronomy and astrophysics and a B.A. (1993) from the University of Pennsylvania with honors in both physics and astronomy & astrophysics. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she received a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program Fellow for 1996-1999 and earned the Physical Sciences Division Teaching Prize at the University of Chicago. She is an associate member of the Science Integration Institute, an organization dedicated to helping people use the scientific process and its insights as an integral part of their daily lives.

The next Physics Club talk will feature Craig Markwardt of the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center noon Friday, April 2, at Gagnon Lecture Hall.

Previous Physics Club talks in 2003-04:

• Brett Fadem, faculty fellow in physics at Colby College: “Nuclear Matter under Extreme Conditions”
• David Helfand, chair of the department of astronomy and astrophysics at Columbia University: “The Universal Timekeeper” and “The Cooling of Neutron Stars”
• New York University physicist Alan Sokal: “Are the Science Wars Over?”
• Suzanne Amador Kane, associate professor and chair of physics and astronomy at Haverford College: “Good Things in Small Packages: Biologically-inspired Nanostructures”
• Michael Shara, curator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Astrophysics: “Relativity for the Millions: Einstein”
• Elliott Horch, assistant professor of physics at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth: “New Opportunities for Astrophysics with Binary Stars”
• Physics majors Cavan Stone ’05 (Shirley, Mass.) and Ibrahima Bah ’06 (Bronx, N.Y), and electrical and computer engineering major Simon Mushi ’06 (Gaborone, Botswana): Researchpalooza