UTK Women in Physics

01/11/2021

A study conducted by Stanford University researchers named 156 UT faculty members among the top 2 percent of scientists in the world for research citations.

05/05/2020

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11/22/2019

Our first Movie Night of the year was a success!
We had a fun time watching Hidden Figures, being inspired by the determination of the women that faced so many obstacles in their careers. We also we're so excited to understand the math and physics behind the launch of Friendship 7.
Thanks to everyone that came out!!

12/05/2018

“I realized early on that there is great value in the scientific method not just for science but for everything we do in our lives. Asking the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions and trying to find answers logically made me a stronger and confident person in all contexts but especially in fighting the cultural bias I faced at home and in society and building a better day-to-day life for myself. That was my main motivation to want to become a physicist. My 9-year old daughter thinks I am awesome and recently wrote a comic about me called ‘Adventures of a Super Mom,’ because she is amazed at how much I multi-task between family, travel, and career. She thinks I am the best mom and scientist in the world and wants to be like me when she grows up. I tend to see that her comic is not just about me but about all those women out there who are strong, independent, and powerful and have built successful careers despite the challenges they face."

– Sowjanya Gollapinni, Cryogenic Instrumentation and Slow Controls Consortium Leader and Joint Calibration Task Force Co-leader, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, US


Learn more about the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment at www.fnal.gov/dune

12/03/2018

Congratulations to Professor Adriana Moreo on her election as an AAAS Fellow!

11/25/2018

Physicist Kira Burt dropped out of school at 16. Now she teaches students that anyone can be a scientist.

11/17/2018

10/23/2018

Congratulations to Professor Kate Jones on being elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society! http://www.phys.utk.edu/news/2018/jones-aps-fellow.html

04/13/2018

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski has been called a “genius” and “the next Einstein.” This Cuban-American says those labels bother her, but they’re hard to avoid. At 16, she became the youngest person ever to build and fly her own plane (and to document the process on YouTube). That same year, she was accepted to MIT, where she graduated with a perfect GPA, at the top of her class.

Today, at 24, she’s doing her postgraduate studies in high energy physics at Harvard. In her second year there, she worked on an experiment involving the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. She has been on the cover of numerous publications and invited to elite scientific conferences around the world. Stephen Hawking even cited her work in a study about black holes.

Pasterski now focuses on quantum gravity, or how gravity affects space and time at the subatomic level, where the laws of physics are different to those we experience in our daily lives. Her findings could change what we know about space and time, which, according to her mentors at Harvard, puts her on a similar level to Hawking and Einstein.

But that’s not how she’d define herself. “I’m just a postgrad student,” she says on her website. “I have so much to learn. I don’t deserve the attention.”

Art by Grace Berríos.
Words by Juliana Jiménez.

12/14/2017