Who’s Who at the Lab-Laura Newburgh

headshot
Name: 
Laura Newburgh
Position: 
Assistant Professor

What do you do here at Wright Lab?  I am an experimental cosmologist. I work on two probes of the Universe: measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB – relic light from ~400,000 years after the Big Bang), and 21cm emission from neutral hydrogen that exists in galaxies. The experiments I work on (Simons Observatory, CMB-S4, CHIME, and HIRAX) promise to help us learn about the early and late-time acceleration of the Universe, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, neutrinos, and light particles in the early universe. For these instruments, I work on a variety of things: data acquisition software development (Simons and CMB-S4), calibration of beams via holographic and quadcopter drone measurements, and assessing the noise properties of the instrumentation (HIRAX).

What is the most unique and/or exciting experience you’ve had here at Wright Lab? It’s hard to choose! I’ve gotten to see Wright Lab graduate student Emily Kuhn go from designing a set of cryogenic radio loads to using the machine shop and APC to help construct them to publishing preliminary results. We’ve also flown our drone equipment at a classic radio site in California and then again with our collaborators at Brookhaven National Lab, providing them with new information about their radio beams. Our group built a control and data acquisition system that has so far culminated in Lauren Saunders’ controlling the Simons telescopes, currently located in a factory in Germany, from her living room while working remotely during the pandemic. 

What is something that people might not know about you that you’d like to share with the community?  I am probably too obsessed with our dog, Brinkley. (See picture, below.) 

Where do you like to work remotely? I hate working remotely, so where I ‘like’ to work remotely is hard to answer, but I work remotely from our living room (and, in the summer, our porch).