Nergis Mavalvala

Nergis Mavalvala
Born	1968 (age 48–49) Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Residence	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Nationality	Pakistan United States
Fields	Astrophysics and Quantum Physics
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis	Alignment issues in laser interferometric gravitational-wave detectors (1997)
Doctoral advisor	Rainer Weiss
Known for	Interferometric gravitational waves, quantum measurement
Notable awards	2013 Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science Recipient, MacArthur Fellows

Nergis Mavalvala, PhD is a Pakistani-American astrophysicist known for her role in the first observation of gravitational waves. She is the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is also the Associate Head of the Department of Physics. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010. Mavalvala is best known for her work on the detection of gravitational waves in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project, but she has also obtained prominent results on other physics problems that evolved out of LIGO: for example, she has performed pioneering experiments on laser cooling of macroscopic objects and in the generation of squeezed quantum states of light.

Mavalvala was born in Lahore but primarily raised in Karachi, Pakistan. She attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Karachi, where she received her O-Level and A-level qualifications. She moved to the United States in 1986 and enrolled at Wellesley College, where she received a bachelor's degree in physics and astronomy in 1990. She went on to do her Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1997.