About Me
I am a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago who develops instrumentation and data analysis techniques to make sensitive measurements of cosmic history. Currently I am working on some of the first line intensity mapping experiments.
SPT-SLIM, is a pathfinder mm-wave line intensity mapping experiment with the potentail for a first detection of the CO power spectrum. This has new spectrometer 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. I am currently working on the integration of the cryostat at Fermilab, and the experiment will deploy to the South Pole to take first data in winter 2024.
TIM (The Terahertz Intensity Mapper) is a balloon based line intensity mapping experiment set to fly in Antarctica in winter 2027. It will survey a 3D volume of CII spanning 4.5 billion years of cosmic history (from redshift 0.52 to 1.67). I lead the analysis group for TIM and am looking forward to using these data to understand galaxy evolution by constraining the cosmic star formation rate, and develop some of the first line intensity mapping techniques that will be used for cosmology analysis.
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
