Meet Our Plenary Speakers
Professor Lina Necib is an astroparticle physicist, interested in understanding the origin of Dark Matter. She uses a combination of simulations and observational data to correlate the dynamics of Dark Matter with that of the stars in the Milky Way, and infer properties of Dark Matter. She has investigated the local dynamic structures in the Solar neighborhood using the Gaia, and contributed to building a catalog of local accreted stars using machine learning techniques. She has also discovered a new stream called Nyx after the Greek Goddess of the Night, and is using spectroscopy to identify its properties. Professor Necib is interested in using Gaia in conjunction with other spectroscopic surveys to understand the Dark Matter profile in the local solar neighborhood, the center of the Galaxy, and in dwarf galaxies. With a background in particle physics, Professor Necib relates the empirical results of Dark Matter to current direct and indirect detection experiments.
Professor Necib is originally from Tunisia. She moved to the US in 2008 to attend Boston University, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Physics in 2012. She then obtained a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT, under the supervision of Professor Jesse Thaler. Subsequently, she moved to California where she was a Sherman Fairchild fellow at Caltech from 2017 to 2020, a Presidential Fellow at the University of California Irvine in 2020, and a Fellow in Theoretical Astrophysics at Carnegie Observatories 2020-2021. Finally, she joins MIT faculty in July 2021.
Professor Chandralekha Singh is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburg Department of Physics & Astronomy. The goal of her research is to identify sources of student difficulties in learning physics both at the introductory and advanced levels, and to design, implement, and assess curricula/pedagogies that may significantly reduce these difficulties. The objective is to enable students at all levels to develop critical thinking skills, and to become good problem solvers and independent learners.
Professor Nikta Fakhri is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at MIT and Physics of Living Systems Group. She completed her undergraduate degree at Sharif University of Technology and her PhD at Rice University. She was a Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellow at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany before joining MIT. Nikta is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics. She is the recipient of the 2018 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Biological Physics and the 2019 NSF CAREER Award.
Her research focuses on combining concepts from physics, biology and engineering to decode non-equilibrium mechanisms in active living matter, to exploit these mechanisms for engineering functional active materials and to identify universal behavior in this broad class of internally driven systems.
