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West Virginia University Eberly College of Arts & Sciences Gravitational Waves and Cosmology Department of Physics and Astronomy
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Showing 26 of 26 profiles

Affiliate Members

Maria Babiuc-Hamilton

Associate Professor
Department of Physics
Marshall University
Email: babiuc@marshall.edu
Phone: (304) 696-2754

Jason Best

Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Institute for Environmental and Physical Sciences
Shepherd University
Email: jbest@shepherd.edu

Tracey DeLaney

Research Assistant Professor
Department of Physics & Engineering
West Virginia Wesleyan College
Email: delaney_t@wvwc.edu

Ryan Lynch

Staff Scientist
Green Bank Observatory
Email: rlynch@nrao.edu

Matteo Luisi

Assistant Professor
Department of Physics
Westminster College
Email: luisimd@westminster.edu

Zachariah Etienne

Associate Professor
Department of Physics
University of Idaho
Email: zetienne@uidaho.edu

Dustin Madison

Assistant Professor
Department of Physics
University of the Pacific
Email: dmadison@pacific.edu

Andrew Seymour

Staff Scientist
Green Bank Observatory
Email: aseymour@nrao.edu

Kshitij Aggarwal

Data Scientist
Bristol Myers Squibb
Email: ka0064@mix.wvu.edu

Paul Brook

Adjunct Faculty
West Virginia University
Email: paul.brook@gmail.com

Advisory Board Members

Arthur Kosowsky

Professor, Associate Director of PITT PACC
University of Pittsburgh
Email: kosowsky@pitt.edu

Arthur Kosowsky is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on cosmology and related issues of theoretical physics. He has done extensive work on the theory of the cosmic microwave background radiation and the ways in which it constrains our models of the universe. He is a member of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) project, which built a custom-designed 6-meter microwave telescope with superconducting bolometric detectors to observe the microwave sky from the Atacama Desert in the Chilean Andes. He is also a member of the Simons Observatory collaboration, which is building the next generation ofground-based microwave telescopes at the same site in Chile. Another long-time research interest is stochastic backgrounds of gravitational waves from early-universe phase transitions. He earned his B.S. in Physics from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was an Arthur Holly Compton Fellow. He then earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a NASA GSRP fellow. He then held positions as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and as assistant then associate professor at Rutgers University before his current appointment at University of Pittsburgh.

Alice Olmstead

Assistant Professor
Texas State University
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Email: Alice.olmstead@txstate.edu

Alice Olmstead is an Assistant Professor in Physics at Texas State University, the co-Director of the Texas State Physics Learning Assistant Program, and a programmatic co-lead on the $2.5 million, NSF-funded Faculty-Student STEM Communities Project. Her research expertise is on strategies that can enable STEM faculty to improve their teaching and lead to long-term change within higher education institutions. She also researches ways to support students in reasoning about the relationships between science, society, and ethics. She earned her B.S. in Astronomy and Physics from Boston University and her Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Maryland.

Chris Palma

Senior Lecturer II
Penn State University
Email: cxp137@psu.edu

Christopher Palma is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students at Pennsylvania State University. He is an astronomy educator specializing in night sky observing, planetarium presentations, hands-on astronomy education, and K-12 science teacher professional development. His current research interests are science pedagogy and educational research in astronomy, but he has also previously done work in Galactic structure and stellar populations. He earned his B.S. in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Physics from Pennsylvania State University and then his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Virginia.

Pavlos Protopapas

Scientific Program Director
Institute for Applied Computational Science
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Email: pavlos@seas.harvard.edu

Ira Thorpe

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA
Email: james.i.thorpe@nasa.gov

Ira Thorpe is a civil servant astrophysicist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. His research focuses on space-based gravitational wave detection and in particular the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) project, for which he serves as NASA Study Scientist. His LISA interests and activities include instrumentation, data analysis, astrophysics, and overall mission concept development. Other research interests include space-based precision metrology and optical interferometry. He earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering / B.A. in Physics from Bucknell University, summa cum laude.. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Florida. He completed a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship at Goddard with Research in gravitational wave detection, laser ranging, and optical communication. From 2012-2017, he led NASA science operations and data analysis activities on the European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder mission.

Ian Ruchlin

Senior Research Scientist
GNS Healthcare
Email: ianruchlin@gmail.com

Ian Ruchlin is physicist, mathematician and developer. He is a Senior Research Scientist at GNS Healthcare, a big data analytics company specializing in healthcare artificial intelligence, where he develops cutting edge machine learning algorithms. He earned his B.S. in both Physics and Mathematics from Syracuse University. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Rochester Institute of Technology before completing his Postdoctoral Fellowship in Mathematics at West Virginia University. During his Postdoc, his primary research involved generating accurate numerical simulations of the inspiral and merger phases of orbiting black hole binaries. In particular, he explored the extreme limits of general relativity in the regime of near maximal intrinsic angular momentum.