Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has peered into the deep past of the cosmos, while also working toward a just and equal future in the scientific community.
Becky Ferreira, December 4, 2020,
For Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, activism is a family tradition. Growing up in east Los Angeles as the child of a labor organizer and a women’s rights activist—and the grandchild of feminist writer and activist Selma James—she was always immersed in the hard work of advancing progressive causes.
Looking back, Prescod-Weinstein said in an interview, this exposure to the exceedingly human challenges of activism might help explain why, as an adolescent, she fell deeply in love with the sublime concepts of cosmology: a field devoted to unraveling the origins, evolution, and fate of the universe.
She recalls enthusiastically recounting to her peers, on high school bus trips, all the cool things she’d learned about the standard model of particle physics from books like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
“I really liked the idea of being able to reduce things to their fundamental parts,” Prescod-Weinstein said in a call. “I witnessed and heard a lot of storytelling and narratives around the ways in which the world was messy, disordered, and messed up.”
“For me, there was something really attractive about this thing that seemed like it had nothing to do with people and was super-organized and just really elegant,” she added.
Over the past two decades, Prescod-Weinstein has followed that passion for cosmology and particle physics to extraordinary heights. After racking up degrees from Harvard College and the University of California, Santa Cruz, she received her PhD from the University of Waterloo as a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
She now serves as an assistant professor of physics and a core faculty member in women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. (She’s also a certified Pilates instructor, an avid watcher of horror movies, and “a hardcore Star Trek fan,” in her words, with some impressive memorabilia to prove it).
A leading expert on delightfully trippy subjects such as dark matter, particle astrophysics, the early universe, and quantum gravity, Prescod-Weinstein has won many awards and honors, most recently the 2021 Edward A. Bouchet Award from the American Physical Society. Her first book, entitled The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, just received a Kirkus starred review in advance of its publication in March.