Professor Cora Dvorkin

Professor Cora Dvorkin is a theoretical cosmologist at Harvard University.  She was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and received her Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires.  In 2011, she earned her Ph. D. in Physics from the University of Chicago and went on to pursue her postdoctoral research at Princeton University.

Professor Dvorkin has focused her studies on the beginnings of the universe, dark matter, and light relics.  She investigates her research in Cosmic Microwave Background (the electromagnetic radiation that was left behind by “the first light”/early universe), the vast structure of the universe, and strong gravitational lensing (the distortion and magnification of light caused by the large gravitational field from the clusters of galaxies).  With her research group, she has shown that – for the first time – machine learning techniques can accelerate the direct detection of dark matter disturbances.  Her research group has also explored different dark matter scenarios using high-resolution simulations through precise statistical measurements of “dark matter substructure.”  Recently, her research group used wavelet scattering transform (WST) – a way of improving image quality by stabilizing any rotations, translations, or deformations of data taken from galaxies – to perform the first field-level analysis of galaxy data retrieval.  The use of WST by her team has shown to the astrophysics world the efficiency of it over traditional estimators and “black box” machines to obtain data of first galaxies.

With particle physicists, Professor Dvorkin identified a new production channel for dark matter produced through the “freeze-in mechanism” (which is the decay of photons in medium-massed plasma), which furthered her research in the strength of dark matter disturbances for detection in the universe.

Professor Dvorkin has been awarded prestigious recognitions in the scientific community, such as “2018 Scientist of the Year” by the Harvard Foundation for “Salient Contributions to Physics, Cosmology, and STEM Education” the 2019 DOE Early Career award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship for 2018-19, a Star Family Challenge prize for Promising Scientific Research in 2018 by Harvard University, and many more!  Through her many research advancements and exploration of various methods to obtain data about the early cosmos and dark matter, Professor Cora Dvorkin has proven herself to be a magnificent contributor to the field of astrophysics and cosmology.

https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/dvorkin

https://dvorkin.physics.harvard.edu/research-highlights/