User:MarionRobinCute/sandbox

Hello, this is my Sandbox. I have decided to work on two articles, Judith Young and Gabriela González. A possible third one is about Samantha Cristoforetti.

Gabriela González:

Gabriela González (born February 24, 1965 in Cordoba, Argentina ) is a professor of physics and astronomy at the Louisiana State University. She has published several papers on Brownian motion as a limit to the sensitivity of gravitational-wave detectors, and her research interest focuses on data analysis for gravitational-wave astronomy.

González has been a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration since 1997 and its spokesperson from March 2011 until March 2017. In February 2016, she was one of the four LIGO scientists announcing the first direct observation of gravitational waves, detected in September 2015. González was elected to membership in the U. S. National Academy of Sciences and in the U. S. American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

Early life and education
Gabriela González completed her primary studies in the city of Córdoba, at the Colegio Luterano Concordia. Her secondary studies were conducted at the Dr. Manuel Lucero Institute, in Alta Córdoba.

González studied physics at the Faculty of Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics (FAMAF) at the National University of Córdoba, where she graduated in 1988. She was driven to study Physics because she "was amazed at how we could explain the world with physics and we could predict what objects would do". She was president of the student center and kept a permanent scientific relationship with FAMAF.

At the University of Córdoba she met her husband, the Argentine physicist Jorge Pullin, now Chair of the Horace Hearne Institute in theoretical Physics at the Louisiana State University. Jorge was at the time a PhD student studying general relativity. Gabriela, or Gaby as she is known among her friends and colleagues, likes to say that their love story goes against Einstein's general relativity theory. Quoting Gabriela, "Einstein said that gravity cannot be blamed for people falling into the arms of love. But this is exactly what happened to us. We met because we both studied gravity".

She moved to the United States to pursue her doctorate studies and obtained her PhD in astrophysics at the University of Syracuse in 1995 under the supervision of Peter Saulson. Her research was focused on the measurement of the Brownian motion of a torsion pendulum in order to predict the thermal noise spectrum with the use of the Fluctuation Theorem, with important implications for interferometric detectors of gravitational waves, such as LIGO and VIRGO. Thermal noise can indeed suppress the extremely small signal of a gravitational wave.

Research and career
After graduating in 1995, she moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work as a staff scientist in the LIGO group. She remained at MIT until 1997, when she joined the faculty at Pennsylvania State University in Baton Rouge, close to the LIGO interferometer in Livingston. Since 2001, she is based at the Louisiana State University, where she became professor of Physics and Astronomy in 2008. She works on the calibration and improvement of gravitational wave detectors.

She is the first woman to receive a full professorship in her department. As a woman in physics, she “had to prove myself perhaps more than other people”. González believes that "science works much better when there are as many women as men".

She has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since it was founded in 1997, served as the elected LSC spokesperson from 2011 until 2017, and was present during the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves in 2016.

González received a first honorary doctorate at the University of Cordoba in 2017, and a second one at the University of Glasgow in 2018.

Gravitational waves detection
In September 2015, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration detected for the first time gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime moving at the speed of light, predicted more than 100 years ago by Einstein. The two teams working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington measured a loud gravitational wave signal originated from the merging of two black holes more than 1.3 billion years ago.

In February 2016, Gabriela Gonzàlez, as member and spokesperson of the collaboration, was one of the four scientists to announce the first direct observation of gravitational waves together with David Reitze, Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne. Weiss and Thorne, together with Barry C. Barish, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for “decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”.

In 2017 González delivered a TED talk on ''How LIGO discovered gravitational waves and what might be next. ''

Awards
In 2007, Gabriela González received the Edward A. Bouchet Award of the American Physical Society.

In 2017, Gabriela González was elected to membership in the U. S. National Academy of Sciences and in the U. S. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2017 Gabriela González and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration were awarded the prestigious Bruno Rossi prize of the American Astronomical Society High Energy Astrophysics Division "for the first direct detections of gravitational waves, for the discovery of merging black hole binaries, and beginning the new era of gravitational-wave astronomy".