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Physics Professor Cynthia Chiang featured in National Geographic
Physics Professor and National Geographic Explorer Cynthia Chiang is the subject of a new National Geographic article out today.
“It was written in some sense,” that National Geographic Explorer Cynthia Chiang would end up in observational cosmology — the study of the origin and development of the universe using specialized detectors and telescopes. “I’m not going to lie, my father was a physicist. My mother’s an astronomer. But no kid wants to be like their parents,” she jokes, semi-seriously.
Chiang always enjoyed building things. It wasn’t unusual for her to experiment with her father’s research equipment; disassembling vacuum chamber components and putting them back together like a child engineer. She thanks, in part, her short attention span for her evolving curiosity: “I am always looking for something.”
For the last few years, Chiang has been looking for signs of the universe’s early existence — from the birth of the first stars more than 13 billion years ago, to the preceding “cosmic dark ages” — and she’s building her own equipment to do it. As a professor of physics at McGill University, she focuses on peering beyond the universe as it is known today, into its distant past, using novel radio technology.