LSU professor Gabriela González can add another distinction to her resume: sharing the stage with Stephen Hawking.
The former spokeswoman for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration, which detected gravitational waves 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted them, will join the renowned British physicist for his 75th birthday public symposium on Sunday.
The Stephen Hawking Public Symposium on Gravity and Black Holes will take place from 7 a.m. to noon at Cambridge University’s Lady Mitchell Hall. The symposium will be streamed online by Discovery Science on Facebook and Youtube.
González, an experimental physicist in the LSU Department of Physics and Astronomy professor, will deliver a speech title “Black Holes and Gravitational Waves.” She is one of three high-profile speakers invited to take part in the symposium. The others are Brian Cox and Martin Rees, both British physicists. Hawking also will speak.
González joined the faculty at LSU in 2001. She is a founding member of the LIGO collaboration.
In 2015, LIGO detectors in Livingston Parish and in Hanford, Washington, detected ripples of spacetime or gravitational waves, confirming Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The milestone was recognized as the 2016 Breakthrough of the Year. Numerous awards were bestowed to 1,000-member international LIGO collaboration.
González has been recognized as one of the “Ten People Who Mattered” by the scientific journal Nature and Scientist of the Year by Great Minds in STEM.
She also is a recipient of the 2017 National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery as well as a newly-elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
