TEDxPittsburgh - Dr. Maura McLaughlin - The Dark Side

Maura is Associate Professor of Physics at West Virginia University spending much of her time studying pulsars and the, as yet unachieved, direct detection
of gravitational waves. Maura became interested in astronomy by reading science
fiction and the works of Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking. She earned her B.S. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Penn State and her Ph.D.
in Astronomy and Space Science from Cornell University. After Cornell, she
became a National Science Foundation distinguished research fellow at the
University of Manchester in England and, in 2004, was part of an international team that discovered the first known system of two pulsars in orbit around
each other. She is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a Research Corporation for
Scientific Advancement Cottrell Scholar, and is the Principal Investigator on the "Pulsar Timing Array for Gravitational Wave Detection" program for the NSF.

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