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About the IGC

Quick Stats:

Centers 4 Academic Units 4 Current Members 159 Former Members 1061 Collaborations 34 Research Topics 16

Overview of the IGC

Please click here for a list of our Ph.D. Theses

The Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos (IGC) is a research community seeking to collectively push out the boundaries of understanding of the fundamental forces of nature and how they shape the evolution of the universe.

Cosmological data reveals forms of matter and energy that are not yet understood. The theory of the fundamental forces, including gravity, must be pushed into new regimes and perhaps fundamentally restructured in order to elegantly explain the origin and evolution of the universe. Astrophysical surveys continue to discover objects with complex dynamics at energy scales completely out of reach in terrestrial experiments; understanding both the origin and the precise physical processes at work in these powerful engines will provide new insights into extreme states of familiar matter. Gravitational wave detections, a brand-new probe of the universe, allow the first direct observations of gravity at work in compact-object mergers. Alone, and with correlated signals from across the electromagnetic spectrum and in the emission of high-energy particles, those observations have enormous science potential.

Meeting the challenges contained in this data requires a joint effort between many converging areas of expertise and an enthusiasm for new ideas and new perspectives. The IGC strives to provide a fertile environment for collaboration between the domains of particle physics, gravitational physics, mathematics, cosmology, astrophysics, statistics, and computation.

Organizational Structure

Advisory Board
IGC Executive Committee
Staff
  • Courtney Shaffer (cls6664@psu.edu), Administrative support

History of the IGC

The Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos was founded in 2007, building on the strengths of Penn State’s Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry (1993-2007, Abhay Ashtekar) and the NSF Physics Frontier Center for Gravitational Waves (2001-2008, Sam Finn, Pablo Laguna, Peter Mészáros). The IGC built on these strong foundations by partnering with Penn State's multimessenger astrophysicists and cosmologists. Abhay Ashtekar founded the Institute and served as its Director until 2021.

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.