I proudly hail from the east Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno and was for a time a third generation resident of Lincoln Heights. Yes, I bleed Dodger Blue. The 54th Black American woman* to earn a Ph.D. from a department of physics, I am a citizen of both the United States and Barbados and am a descendant of Afro-Caribbean and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. I’m all #BlackandSTEM and all Jewish.

Education

After deciding to become a theoretical physicist at the age of 10, at 17, I left East L.A. to attend Harvard College where I earned a bachelors in Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2003. I then began a PhD in astronomy. But after passing the PhD preliminary exam and earning a Masters in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2005), I changed research directions and in 2006 moved to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to work with Dr. Lee Smolin to work on quantum gravity. I completed my doctoral dissertation, “Cosmic Acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology,” at the Perimeter Institute under the joint direction of Dr. Smolin and Professor Niayesh Afshordi in late 2010 and graduated from University of Waterloo (Canada) Department of Physics and Astronomy with a PhD in June 2011.

Professional History

I am currently an Associate Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire, where I was an Assistant Professor until 2023. From March 2016 to December 2018, I held a Research Associate position in the High Energy Theory Group of the Department of Physics at the University of Washington, and my advisor was Professor Ann Nelson.

Previously, I held a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I was initially appointed to Professor Ed Bertschinger’s research group in MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research before joining Professor Alan Guth‘s group in the Center for Theoretical Physics. 

My first postdoc was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship in the Observational Cosmology Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center, where I was involved with studying the capacity for weak lensing on the Nancy Roman Telescope.

*This data is collected by Dr. Jami Valentine Miller, and the numbers are regularly adjusted to reflect information that we did not have before. The numbers can also change if graduates of astronomy, materials science, medical physics, and biophysics departments are included in the count or not. When astronomy and materials science are included, I am number 63.