Adrienne Lynn Erickcek is an American theoretical cosmologist whose research aims at understanding cosmic inflation, dark matter, dark energy and chameleon particles, and alternatives to general relativity such as f(R) gravity. She is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Erickcek became interested in astrophysics very early in her life. [1] She attended high school at Loy Norrix High School and the Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center in Kalamazoo, Michigan. [2] In 2013 she called out Kalamazoo physics teacher Michael Sinclair as particularly inspirational for her. [3]
Erickcek majored in physics at Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude in 2003. [4] After a year in England studying for the Mathematical Tripos (master of advanced study) in Churchill College, Cambridge, supported by a Churchill Scholarship, [4] [2] she entered the doctoral program in physics at the California Institute of Technology. She completed her Ph.D. there in 2009, with the dissertation The Consequences of Modifying Fundamental Cosmological Theories supervised by Marc Kamionkowski. [4] [5] [6]
She became a postdoctoral researcher in Canada at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. Next, she took an assistant professorship at the University of North Carolina in 2013. She was promoted to associate professor in 2019. [4]
Erickcek was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2023, after a nomination from the APS Division of Astrophysics, "for theoretical contributions spanning cosmology, including inflation, cosmic acceleration, and dark matter, with a key focus on understanding primordial density perturbations on small distance scales". [7]
Erickcek is married to Nicholas M. Law, an observational astronomer at the University of North Carolina. [5] [1] [8]
Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the heavenly bodies, rather than their positions or motions in space–what they are, rather than where they are." Among the subjects studied are the Sun, other stars, galaxies, extrasolar planets, the interstellar medium and the cosmic microwave background. Emissions from these objects are examined across all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the properties examined include luminosity, density, temperature, and chemical composition. Because astrophysics is a very broad subject, astrophysicists apply concepts and methods from many disciplines of physics, including classical mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear and particle physics, and atomic and molecular physics.
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