This week's geek has never let traditional roles and societal expectations hold her back.
Nergis Mavalvala was born in Lahore, Pakistan and mainly raised in Karachi. Even as a child, she did things like tinker with her bike and experiment with the reagents in the Chem lab after school (with her teacher's approval!), things that most girls around her just did not do. She moved to the US for college, eventually earning a PhD in Physics from MIT. Her ability to work with her professors as an equal even when she was a student impressed her mentors.
Mavalvala went on to post-graduate work at the California Institute of Technology, where she worked on the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Observatory, (LIGO) . In February, it was announced that this facility had detected such waves, ripples in space and time that were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago.
With that announcement, Nergis Mavalvala became a scientific hero and a role model in her native Pakistan. She currently is a professor at MIT and lives with her partner and child in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For her participation in amazing, world changing discoveries, her enthusiastic pursuit of her scientific interests, her refusal to conform to stereotypical gender roles, and her inspiration to the people of her country, Nergis Mavalvala truly deserves to be a Ravenclaw Geek of the Week!
Learn more about Nergis Mavalvala:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nergis_Mavalvala
http://www.dawn.com/news/1239270
Got a geek you'd like us to feature? Nominate them here.
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