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Organization

The Society of Physics Students (SPS)

The Society of Physics Students (SPS)

The Society of Physics Students (SPS) is a club at Penn State dedicated to bringing together those interested in physics. Anyone with any level of knowledge in physics (even none) is welcome to join! Make new friends, participate in cool experiments, and enjoy our lounge in 219 Osmond! We’d love to meet you!

Meetings are every Monday, during the school year, from 5-6 PM in our lounge.

For more information please email our president Jacob Rea spspres@psu.edu or our advisor Dr. Mike Smitka at mts56@psu.edu.

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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.