Summary: While in New York City, Neil attended a few events at the World Science Festival, including one at which a speaker was astrophysicist Britt Reichborn-Kjennerud. Before the talk Neil met up with Britt at her office at Columbia University and recorded this podcast. Britt Reichborn-Kjennerud received her PhD from Columbia University in 2010. During her graduate career she held a NASA fellowship, and she is currently an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow in Amber Miller’s Lab at Columbia University. An experimental astrophysicist, Britt uses measurements of the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang, to understand the origin, composition, and evolution of the universe. She has been a member of the EBEX experimental team at the Miller lab since 2005, and is currently overseeing the work of the Columbia team as they prepare to deploy the EBEX instrument to Antarctica later this year. This experiment will map a patch of the microwave sky from the top of the stratosphere while hanging from a NASA helium balloon. The resulting data set holds the promise of detecting a signal that originated when the universe was just a tiny fraction of a second old.
