Our PhD student is one of the eight worldwide students that will be joining the program in the winter/spring term of 2020.
Marija Tomaševic is a PhD student of Gravitation and Cosmology at our Institute, and has been recently granted a place at the prestigious Graduate Fellowship program. The program is offered by the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and funded by the University of California Santa Barbara. It is aimed at excellent graduate students from all over the world, with a highly competitive selection process, as students interested in attending the program cannot directly apply but have to be nominated by their mentor. Tomaševic is one of the eight students that will be joining the program on January 2020, after being nominated by her PhD director Roberto Emparan. The fellowship funding covers the accommodation and expenses for a period from five to six months.
The Graduate Program was born with the aim of expanding the knowledge among the young physicists, in order to train them in the rapidly changing scientific world. It was designed considering that physicists often suffer from over specialization, which narrows even more across the different stages of the researching career. The main purpose of the program is to help broaden the education of young physicists, offering several courses, workshops and talks in different fields of physics.
Students are expected to join and participate in the different courses, and a mentor guides them during their stay. Although is not the main goal, they might join the research team led by their mentors, and in some cases that might result in research collaborations.
Although normally the selected students are in the final year of their PhD, Tomaševic is just now starting her third year, after finishing her Master in theoretical physics at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. Her work focuses on the physics of black holes, with special attention given to the quantum effects in black holes. She has been recently working on other interesting aspects of space-time, like the (im) possibility of time machines and the physics therein. She will be mentored by University of Santa Barbara Professor Gary Horowitz, who is interested in researching both classical and quantum aspects of gravitational physics.
