Chanda Prescod-Weinstein


Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an American and Barbadian cosmologist, science writer and equality activist based at the University of New Hampshire. From 2016-2018, she was the Principal Investigator on a Foundational Questions Institute grant titled "Epistemological Schemata of Astro | Physics: A Reconstruction of Observers".

Early life and education

Prescod-Weinstein was born in El Sereno in East Los Angeles, California, and went to school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is of Barbadian descent on her mother's side and Russian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish descent on her father's side. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics and Astronomy at Harvard College in 2003. Her thesis, "A study of winds in active galactic nuclei", was completed under the supervision of Martin Elvis. She then earned a Master's degree in Astronomy in 2005 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Anthony Aguirre. In 2006, Prescod-Weinstein changed research directions and ultimately moved to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to work with Dr. Lee Smolin. In 2010, Prescod-Weinstein completed her Ph.D. dissertation, titled "Acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology", under the supervision of Lee Smolin and Niayesh Afshordi at University of Waterloo, while conducting her research at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Research

Prescod-Weinstein's research has focused on various topics in cosmology and theoretical physics, including the axion as a dark matter candidate, inflation, and classical and quantum fields in the early universe.
From 2004 to 2007 Prescod-Weinstein was a named National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
After Prescod-Weinstein's Ph.D., she was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow in the Observational Cosmology Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2011, she won a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was jointly appointed to the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the Department of Physics. At MIT, Prescod-Weinstein worked in Alan Guth's group in the Center for Theoretical Physics.
In 2016, she became the Principal Investigator on a $100,522 FQXI grant to study “Epistemological Schemata of Astro | Physics: A Reconstruction of Observers” seeking to answer questions regarding how to re-frame who is an "observer", to acknowledge those existing outside of the European Enlightenment framework, and how that might change knowledge production in science.
She is working on the NASA STROBE-X experiment.

Awards

Prescod-Weinstein earned the Barbados House Canada Inc. Gordon C Bynoe Scholarship in 2007. In 2013 she won the MIT "Infinite Kilometer Award". In March 2017, Prescod-Weinstein won the LGBT+ Physicists Acknowledgement of Excellence Award "For Years of Dedicated Effort in Changing Physics Culture to be More Inclusive and Understanding Toward All Marginalised Peoples".
Prescod-Weinstein was recognized by Essence Magazine as one of 15 Black Women Who are Paving the Way in STEM and Breaking Barriers. Prescod-Weinstein's personal story and ideas have been featured in several venues, including Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Nylon, and the African-American Intellectual History Society.

Public engagement

Prescod-Weinstein is an advocate for increasing the diversity within science by considering intersectionality and proper celebration of the underrepresented groups who contribute to scientific knowledge production. She has been a member of the executive committee of the National Society of Black Physicists. In 2017 she was a plenary speaker at the Women in Physics Canada meeting.
Prescod-Weinstein has contributed popular science articles for Slate, American Scientist, Nature Astronomy, Bitch media, and Physics World. She is on the Book Review Board of Physics Today and was editor-in-chief of The Offing. The American Physical Society described her as a "vocal presence on Twitter". Prescod-Weinstein maintains a Decolonising Science Reading List. Prescod-Weinstein has given several interviews and public talks.
In 2018, Prescod-Weinstein was one of 18 authors of "Particles for Justice", a statement condemning Alessandro Strumia's controversial comments on women in physics at CERN.
Prescod-Weinstein's book, The Disordered Cosmos: From Dark Matter to Black Lives Matter, is forthcoming from Bold Type Books in Spring 2021, and draws from her experience and knowledge as a Black woman theoretical physicist. She is a monthly contributor to New Scientist, with a column entitled "Field Notes from Space-time."
Prescod-Weinstein was a founding member of the American Astronomical Society Committee for Sexual Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy. Prescod-Weinstein has in the past also been a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Advisory council.

Personal life

Prescod-Weinstein is queer and agender. She is married to a lawyer. She has no children. Her mother Margaret Prescod emigrated from Barbados as a teenager, and in New York was a founder of International Black Women for Wages for housework in 1974. Prescod-Weinstein is the granddaughter of feminist Selma James and the step-granddaughter of Trinidadian writer and historian C.L.R. James. Prescod-Weinstein is a very active advocate for social justice issues on Twitter.