About Me
I am a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago who develops cutting-edge instrumentation and data analysis techniques to make sensitive measurements of cosmic history. Currently I am working on SPT-SLIM, a pathfinder mm-wave line intensity mapping experiment with the potentail for a first detection of the CO power spectrum. This has new sepctrometer technology which will allow line intensity mapping telescopes to be scaled to the sensitivity needed for cosmological surveys to probe the Hubble tension, inflation, neutrino properties, and search for new light particles.
As a graduate student at UC Berkeley I worked on the South Pole Telescope (SPT), a 10-meter microwave telescope at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. During grad school I built and commissioned SPT-3G, the most recent camera on the SPT. SPT-3G makes precision measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the oldest light in the universe. For my thesis, I developed novel analysis techniques to measure the polarization of the CMB to search for the signature of gravitational waves imprinted during inflation.
Previous to grad school, I worked on a variety of projects pursuing my interest in high-energy astrophysics. These included doing site characterization and instrumentation for the Greenland Neutrino Observatory, an in-ice radio detector for astrophysical ultra-high energy neutrinos, and studying cosmic ray acceleration in supernova remnants with the Fermi LAT and VERITAS.
In Fall 2025, I will hold a joint appointment as a Fermilab Lederman Fellow and as a University of Chicago KICP Fellow.
Contact Details
Jessica Avva Zebrowski
University of Chicago
5640 S. Ellis Ave - ERC 423
Chicago, IL 60637
j.z(at)uchicago.edu
