Listening to the Universe

In this talk, Dr. Dooley speaks about her work on proving Einstein right. Her research is focused on designing improvements to the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in collaboration with colleagues in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Katherine reviews the history of the experiments that led to this breakthrough and show that in large-scale science, although we can still find heroes who opened up new venues, many individual researchers operate behind the scenes. Such a workforce will be all the more necessary for building the next generation of gravitational wave detectors around the world, which will be specialized to hear different tones of the sound spectrum from space. Katherine is from Poughkeepsie, NY where she attended Vassar College, graduating with a B.A. in Physics. She earned her doctorate in Physics from the U. of Florida in 2011 for her contributions to improving the Initial LIGO gravitational-wave detectors. She then moved to Hannover, Germany for a position as a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational-wave Physics / Albert Einstein Institute where she integrated squeezed light technology to the GEO 600 gravitational-wave detector. After her work in Germany and prior to joining The University of Mississippi in 2015, Kate was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech. Currently, Kate is active in experimental gravitational-wave research and in teaching physics for physics and engineering majors. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/ted