Gwynne Crowder

"Upon the advice of an undergraduate advisor, I joined a research lab studying light left over from the early Universe. That advice ended up changing the trajectory of my life: in addition to seeing what the day-to-day experiences of a physicist were like, I also got to join the lab in their trip to Antarctica to study that light. Being in Antarctica was incredible. Every day was an adventure where I got to learn and do new science, meet and talk to interesting people with incredibly varied backgrounds and interests, and be in a place with continuous daylight illuminating a landscape dominated by ice and snow. In graduate school, I studied the hot gas that surrounds us within our neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy. Since the light from the hot gas is absorbed in our atmosphere, we had to collect data from above the atmosphere. We did that by building instruments and launching them on rockets called sounding rockets, which are launched and then fall back to the ground. The funny thing about these rockets is that it doesn't take that long for them to make the trip up and down, and only part of that time is in space where we could gather data. Years of work by a team of scientists and we had 5 minutes of data. But those 5 minutes were the ONLY data of that type in the world, and the instruments we used on the rocket flight were an important testing bed for that technology in future satellite missions. It wasn’t until after I graduated that I joined LIGO as a postdoc researcher. Being part of LIGO for the first gravitational-wave detections has been really exciting. I now have the amazing job of helping undergraduates learn lots of cool physics in the classroom, and have students working on LIGO research."

Gwynne Crowder is a Teaching Associate Professor at Bellevue College in Bellevue, WA. She searches for a background “buzz” of gravitational waves (also known as the stochastic gravitational-wave background), and with her students studies how different kinds of interference might affect searches for the stochastic background. She also enjoys sharing cool science with others. In her free time, Gwynne loves to be with her family, eat cuisines from around the world, and hike through the Pacific Northwest, from mountains to ocean beaches.