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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (born c. 1982) is an American theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist at the University of New Hampshire. She is also an advocate of increasing diversity in science.
Prescod-Weinstein was born in Los Angeles, California, where she grew up in the eastside neighborhood of El Sereno and attended schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is of Barbadian descent on her mother's side and Russian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish descent on her father's side. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and astronomy at Harvard College in 2003. Her thesis, "A study of winds in active galactic nuclei", was completed under the supervision of Martin Elvis. She then earned a master's degree in astronomy in 2005 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Anthony Aguirre. In 2006, Prescod-Weinstein changed research directions and ultimately moved to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to work with Lee Smolin. In 2010, Prescod-Weinstein completed her doctoral dissertation, titled "Cosmic acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology", under the supervision of Lee Smolin and Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo, while conducting her research at the Perimeter Institute.
Prescod-Weinstein's research has focused on various topics in cosmology and theoretical physics, including the axion as a dark matter candidate, inflation, and classical and quantum fields in the early universe.
From 2004 to 2007, she was a named National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
After earning her Ph.D., she became a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow in the Observational Cosmology Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2011, she won a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was jointly appointed to the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the department of physics. At MIT, Prescod-Weinstein worked in Alan Guth's group in the Center for Theoretical Physics. From 2016-2017, Prescod-Weinstein worked as Ann Nelson's Research Associate in the High Energy Theory Group of the Department of Physics at the University of Washington.
In 2016, she became the principal investigator on a $100,522 FQXI grant to study "Epistemological Schemata of Astro | Physics: A Reconstruction of Observers" seeking to answer questions regarding how to re-frame who is an "observer", to acknowledge those existing outside of the European Enlightenment framework, and how that might change knowledge production in science.
She is working on the NASA STROBE-X experiment.
Since 2019, she has been a faculty member in physics and astronomy, as well as in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She earned tenure in 2023.
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (born c. 1982) is an American theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist at the University of New Hampshire. She is also an advocate of increasing diversity in science.
Prescod-Weinstein was born in Los Angeles, California, where she grew up in the eastside neighborhood of El Sereno and attended schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is of Barbadian descent on her mother's side and Russian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish descent on her father's side. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and astronomy at Harvard College in 2003. Her thesis, "A study of winds in active galactic nuclei", was completed under the supervision of Martin Elvis. She then earned a master's degree in astronomy in 2005 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Anthony Aguirre. In 2006, Prescod-Weinstein changed research directions and ultimately moved to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to work with Lee Smolin. In 2010, Prescod-Weinstein completed her doctoral dissertation, titled "Cosmic acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology", under the supervision of Lee Smolin and Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo, while conducting her research at the Perimeter Institute.
Prescod-Weinstein's research has focused on various topics in cosmology and theoretical physics, including the axion as a dark matter candidate, inflation, and classical and quantum fields in the early universe.
From 2004 to 2007, she was a named National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
After earning her Ph.D., she became a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow in the Observational Cosmology Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2011, she won a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was jointly appointed to the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the department of physics. At MIT, Prescod-Weinstein worked in Alan Guth's group in the Center for Theoretical Physics. From 2016-2017, Prescod-Weinstein worked as Ann Nelson's Research Associate in the High Energy Theory Group of the Department of Physics at the University of Washington.
In 2016, she became the principal investigator on a $100,522 FQXI grant to study "Epistemological Schemata of Astro | Physics: A Reconstruction of Observers" seeking to answer questions regarding how to re-frame who is an "observer", to acknowledge those existing outside of the European Enlightenment framework, and how that might change knowledge production in science.
She is working on the NASA STROBE-X experiment.
Since 2019, she has been a faculty member in physics and astronomy, as well as in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She earned tenure in 2023.
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