Christine Corbett Moran is a scientist working at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica from January-November 2016. She is making observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the fading glow of the Big Bang, using the South Pole Telescope and optimizing data analysis focusing on identifying galaxy clusters at large distances in the universe.

To do her on-site work in Antarctica she is on a one year leave from her research at Caltech in the Theoretical AstroPhysics Including Relativity and Cosmology group (TAPIR). Her research focuses on computational cosmology, numerical relativity, high performance computing, and big data visualization. Her primary interest is the gravitational force, which she considers to be the most beautiful and mysterious of all of nature’s fundamental forces.

Christine has done a variety of work across academic and industry boundaries in machine learning, software development, entrepreneurship, cryptography, computational physics and mobile app development with SpaceX, Open Whisper Systems, BBN Technologies, MIT CSAIL, MIT Media Lab, Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs Site), FAST Search and Transfer, UP Diliman, MIT, JHU, and MIT MEET.

The South Pole LIVE

On Saturday on the Lovell Stage, Professor Tim O’Brien will be talking live to Dr Christine Corbett Moran at the South Pole. Christine is working at the Amundsen-Scott Research Station using the South Pole Telescope to study the fading glow of the Big Bang. This will be a unique insight into why scientists are stationed in one of the most extreme environments on the planet.