Gray Rybka is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Washington. His research focuses on precision measurements to expand our knowledge of the fundamental particle building blocks of the universe. These experiments often involve the use of superconducting quantum electronics in a deep cryogenic environment. He is co-spokesperson of the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX), which searches for microwave signals produced from dark matter conversion in a superconducting magnetic field. He is also involved in the Project-8 effort to measure the neutrino mass scale using Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy.

Megan Ivory is developing novel scalable systems for next-generation quantum computers as a Research Associate in the Trapped Ion Quantum Computing Group at the University of Washington. She received her PhD from the College of William and Mary where she built the university’s first chip-based Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) apparatus from scratch. Afterward, she spent four years in industry leading ColdQuanta Inc.’s Quantum Information Systems Team where she developed compact and commercializable quantum atomic systems. Megan’s current research focuses on two-dimensional crystals of ions that can be used for quantum gates with large qubit numbers, quantum chemistry simulations, and modeling crystal defects and phase transitions.

Emma Schmidgall is currently a research associate in physics at the University of Washington, Department of Physics, where she works with Prof. Kai-Mei Fu. Her PhD is from the Technion, where she was apart of the research group of Prof. David Gershoni, working on quantum information processing using single spins confined in semiconductor quantum dots. Previously, she was a process engineer in photolithography in the Research and Development group at TowerJazz Semiconductor. She studied physics, history, and nanomaterials at Caltech, the University of Cambridge, and Imperial College London.

Title: LIGO, Black Holes, and our new view of the Universe

Joey Shapiro Key is Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Washington Bothell. She has a BA in Astrophysics from William College and a PhD in Physics from Montana State University. She works on data analysis and parameter estimation in gravitational wave astronomy for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration (LSC), European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, and the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational waves (NANOGrav).

Sarah Tuttle is an Assistant Professor in the Astronomy Dept. at the University of Washington, Seattle. She got her PhD from Columbia University where she built the first fiber fed ultraviolet spectrograph for FIREBall (the Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon). She most recently worked as a postdoc and a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin/McDonald Observatory, where she worked on the VIRUS spectrographs in support of the Hobby Eberly Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). Sarah serves as the instrument scientist for the Apache Point Observatory, and is working to upgrade the spectroscopy suite for the 3.5m telescope there. Her group is also active in supporting the design and manufacture of hardware for SDSS-V. Her main research interests are galaxy evolution, UV and optical instrument building, undermining systemic bias, and bringing an intersectional feminist framework to research astrophysics.