Asimina Arvanitaki

Asimina Arvanitaki (PhD Stanford University, 2008) is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Aristarchus Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute, where she has been a faculty member since 2014. 

Arvanitaki is a particle physicist whose work has focused on designing novel experiments that search for new phenomena and new forces of nature. She has shown, for example, how atomic clocks—the most precise time-keeping devices to date that are used to define the second and are responsible for the GPS that we all use—can be used to detect dark matter, the unknown mass component of our Cosmos that is responsible for the existence of galaxies. 

She has also shown how black holes, such as those recently detected at the LIGO experiment, can be used to diagnose the presence of new particles. For her work, she was co-awarded the 2017 New Horizons in Physics Prize by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. Recently, Arvanitaki has received notable accolades, including the 2023 Loeb Lectures in Physics at Harvard University and the 2022 CAP-TRIUMF Vogt Medal from the Canadian Association of Physicists.