Nergis Mavalvala

Nergis Mavalvala is a Pakistani-American astrophysicist, born in Lahore in 1968 and raised in Karachi. She is the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and dean of the university's School of Science. She is best known for her role in the first observation of gravitational waves by the LIGO project, and for experimental work on the quantum limits of measurement, including the laser cooling of macroscopic objects and the generation of squeezed states of light. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010. ¹

She was born in Lahore and raised primarily in Karachi, where she attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary and took her O-Level and A-Level qualifications. In 1986 she moved to the United States and enrolled at Wellesley College, graduating in physics and astronomy in 1990. She then joined Rainer Weiss's group at MIT and received her PhD in physics in 1997, with a thesis on alignment issues in laser interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. ¹

After her doctorate she worked at the California Institute of Technology, first as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a research scientist, on the LIGO project. She joined the MIT physics faculty in 2002. As a member of the LIGO collaboration she shared in the first direct detection of gravitational waves, announced in 2016, and in the Gruber Prize and the Special Breakthrough Prize awarded for it. She was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2017, and in 2020 she became dean of MIT's School of Science, the first woman to hold that post. Alongside the gravitational-wave work, her group produced pioneering results on laser cooling of macroscopic objects — cooling a centimetre-scale object toward its quantum ground state — and on squeezed quantum states of light. ¹

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The sources describe her background in terms of her family: the English article says she was born "to a Parsi family that practiced Zoroastrianism", and the Urdu article frames the faith the same way, as her family's. One independent source names her personally: the Pakistani daily The News, writing in August 2020 on her MIT deanship, calls her "a Zoroastrian born in Lahore". The museum records her faith as unknown for now, because a personal affiliation is entered only when two independent sources name it for the person; the attestations are set out in full in her data record so the reader can see exactly what each source gives. ^{1 2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.