16: Shedding Light on Dark Matter and Dark Energy

A conversation about the composition of the universe with Dr. Jason Rhodes and Dr. Alina Kiessling Dr. Rhodes graduated from West Valley high school in Des Moines, Iowa, earned a B.S. in physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA and an M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. After stints as a researcher at NASA’s, Goddard, Spaceflight Center in Maryland and at Caltech in Pasadena, he landed a position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His projects include NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission, and the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. All of these are designed to study, “Dark Energy”, the hypothesized cause of the Universe’s accelerated expansion. ​ Dr. Kiessling is a Jet Propulsion Laboratory Research Scientist, investigating Dark Matter and Dark Energy through Weak Lensing Analysis of N-body Simulations. She’s a member of Euclid and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Dark Energy Science Collaboration and was a consultant on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Science Definition Reports. Alina earned a B.Sc. in Space Science from La Trobe University in Australia and her Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Edinburgh, in the UK.