Women in Science and Engineering at Yale (2020 Edition)

Laura Newburgh, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Physics, Department of Physics

Laura Newburgh builds instruments to chart the past 13 billion years of cosmic history. She measures the Universe when it was ~400,000 years old through the Cosmic Microwave Background using millimeter-wide telescopes and she also measures the distribution of galaxies in the sky using radio telescopes. The resulting combined data sets will probe the nature of Dark Energy, Dark Matter, the sum of neutrino masses, and cosmic inflation.

“Focal-plane-ok!” Professor Newburgh at the ACT telescope site at 17,000 ft. in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile in 2012. She had just checked that the focal plane of ~3,000 sensors (seen on the table) survived shipping and is ready to be installed on the 6 meter ACT telescope and then will be cooled to 0.1 C above absolute zero (very cold). The data from this detector array is used to study the Universe when it was 400,000 years old (an infant Universe compared to today, nearly 13 billion years later) and it has generated > 20 scientific papers. Photo credit: Benjamin Schmitt