Nergis Mavalvala, Marble Professor of Astrophysics at MIT and a 2010 recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award, is a physicist whose research focuses on the detection of gravitational waves and quantum measurement science.

Professor Mavalvala received a B.A. from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. from MIT. She was a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist at the California Institute of Technology before joining the Physics faculty at MIT in 2002. She was appointed Associate Department Head of Physics in February 2015, overseeing the department’s academic programming and student well-being for the next five years. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017. In 2020, Nergis was named Dean of MIT’s School of Science.

Mavalvala is an award-winning physicist and a pioneer in the detection of gravitational waves and of quantum measurement science. She is a longtime member of the scientific team behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which in 2016 detected the gravitational waves resulting from colliding black holes. With her doctoral adviser, Rainer Weiss, she helped to develop the gravitational-wave detector technologies that are at the heart of LIGO, which enabled the scientific discoveries that earned Weiss and his colleagues the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. The LIGO discovery—ripples in the space-time fabric caused by the motion of black holes and neutron stars—has been widely hailed as the dawn of a new era in astrophysics, allowing researchers to observe objects in the universe that are not visible with light. In the quest for ever greater sensitivity in the LIGO detectors, Mavalvala has also conducted pioneering experiments on generation and application of squeezed states of light, and on laser cooling and trapping of macroscopic objects to enable observation of quantum phenomena in human-scale systems.

For her groundbreaking research and her role in achieving the LIGO discoveries, Mavalvala has received numerous awards and recognitions, including a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2005), a MacArthur Fellowship (2010), the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2016), and the Carnegie Corporation’s Great Immigrant Award (2017). An outspoken voice for equality and women’s access to education, and a dedicated mentor and role model for the LGBTQ+ community, she was honored in 2014 as the LGBTQ Scientist of the Year by the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.