Wellesley alum, MIT professor wins MacArthur grant

On Sept. 28, Nergis Mavalvala '90 was announced as one of the winners of the prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant.

"At first, I was convinced it was a prank call," Mavalvala said. The phone call was from Dan Socolow, director of the program, who told her she won a MacArthur grant only ten days before making the official announcement on Sept. 28.

The Macarthur Fellows Program rewards individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary creativity and originality in their respective fields. It is awarded not only for their potential contributions in their field of study, but also for past accomplishments. Mavalvala is one of 23 MacArthur Fellows announced this year. The group includes a marine biologist, an American historian, a high school physics teacher and an economist. With the honor, each winner is granted $500,000 with "no strings attached," over the next five years.

"I'm incredibly humbled and so honored," Mavalvala said about winning the grant. "I'm delighted to have such a unequivocal acknowledgement of the science that I do, but the greatest pleasure of all is to see the work of my amazing students and co-workers honored in this way."

Mavalvala received a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Physics in 1997. She then became a postdoctoral research scientist at the California Institute of Technology. Mavalvala returned to MIT as a member of the Physics faculty in 2002.

As a quantum astrophysicist, her research concerns quantum mechanics, usually only evident at the atomic scale, and its link with the more mysterious, powerful forces of the universe.

"Almost everything we know about the Universe, near and far, is known from light," Mavalvala said about her research. "There is another messenger out there – the gravitational wave. It comes from the gravity and motion of objects. My work involves trying to detect these gravitational waves." As gravitational waves are very faint, one can only imagine the difficult task of detecting them. Her job is to devise ways of improving the instruments used—such as Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors—to detect these waves.

She started her physics research at Wellesley in professor of physics Robbie Berg's lab. "One of the very early things he asked me to do was to clean one of the laser mirrors and to realign the laser," Mavalvala said. "And I recall very distinctly that I really botched that up." The incident took many days to recover from, but she claimed that Berg was very good-natured about it.