Nergis Mavalvala

Nergis Mavalvala was born in 1968 in Karachi, Pakistan, into a Parsi Zoroastrian family. Growing up in Karachi, she demonstrated exceptional aptitude in science and mathematics from an early age. She completed her undergraduate education at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, USA, graduating in 1990, before going on to earn her doctorate in physics from MIT in 1997 under the supervision of Rainer Weiss, who would later share the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Mavalvala joined the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) project as a graduate student and has remained one of its central figures ever since. LIGO is an engineering marvel: two L-shaped detectors, each with arms four kilometers long, capable of detecting a change in length smaller than one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton. The challenge of isolating such a tiny signal from all terrestrial noise is as much a physics problem as an engineering one, and Mavalvala has been instrumental in solving it.

On September 14, 2015, LIGO made history by detecting gravitational waves for the first time — ripples in the fabric of spacetime produced by two merging black holes 1.3 billion light-years away, confirming a key prediction of Einstein's general relativity that had remained unverified for a century. Mavalvala was a key contributor to this epoch-defining discovery.

Her own research focuses on quantum optics techniques to reduce noise in laser interferometers to below the standard quantum limit, and on quantum squeezing of light — manipulating quantum states to improve measurement precision. She has demonstrated quantum-mechanical behavior in objects massive enough to be seen with the naked eye.

Mavalvala became the first woman of color to serve as Dean of Science at MIT in 2020 — a historic appointment that added to her already remarkable list of firsts. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has received numerous honors including a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.