Maura A. McLaughlin

Biosketch

Maura McLaughlin is the Eberly Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Department Chair at West Virginia University. She earned her BS in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Penn State University and her PhD in Astronomy and Space Sciences from Cornell University. She was then awarded an NSF Distinguished Research Fellowship for postdoctoral work at the Jodrell Bank Observatory at the University of Manchester, UK, before coming to West Virginia University in 2006. She co-founded the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology at West Virginia University and is Co-Director of the NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center and the Pulsar Science Collaboratory outreach program, which has involved over 2,000 high-school and college students in pulsar science. She received the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement’s Cottrell Scholar Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, an APS Fellowship, the SURA Distinguished Scientist Award, and the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement’s Cottrell IMPACT Award. In 2023, she won the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Research Interests

Maura McLaughlin is an observational astronomer who has devoted her career to studies of neutron stars across the electromagnetic spectrum. She developed methods for the detection of short-duration radio transients, leading to discoveries of a new class of sporadically-emitting neutron stars in our galaxy and to extremely luminous extragalactic fast radio bursts. She has published many papers on pulsar searches and studies of individually interesting pulsars, such as the Double Pulsar system. She is also deeply involved in the work of the NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves) collaboration, which aims to detect and study low-frequency ripples in space-time called gravitational waves using high-precision timing observations of radio pulsars. In June 2023, NANOGrav, along with other members of the International Pulsar Timing Array collaboration, announced the discovery of a stochastic background of low-frequency gravitational waves. These waves likely originate in supermassive black hole binaries at the cores of galaxy mergers. Over the next decade she and her colleagues will be able to constrain the processes of galaxy formation and evolution through characterization of this background and through the detections of individual supermassive black hole binaries through their gravitational-wave emission. They will also place constraints on other possible astrophysical sources for the gravitational-wave background, such as early universe inflation or cosmic strings.