New Faculty: Supraja Balasubramanian
Studying how far we can go to understand the fundamental structure of the universe is just one of the ways Mount Holyoke College Assistant Professor of Physics Supraja Balasubramanian aims to expand the boundaries of our knowledge.
New Assistant Professor of Physics Supraja Balasubramanian poses several questions when talking about her background in particle physics and studying the fundamental interactions of the universe.
“I’m an experimental particle physicist. I work with theorists who come up with all sorts of ideas of how the world works, and then I implement it through,” Balasubramanian said. “Let’s say dark matter exists, and it would have this specific form; how could we as human beings try to interact with it? How could we observe it? How could we discover it? How could we understand something about the universe using the tools that we have?”
As she begins her teaching at Mount Holyoke College, Balasubramanian, a baccalaureate graduate of Columbia from Chennai, India, wants to demonstrate that physics doesn’t have to be stressful.
“I’m really hoping to bring some of that wonder and imagination and abstract beauty to the classroom because physics is sort of commonly considered boring, stressful and difficult,” Balasubramanian said. “But I think there are beautiful concepts there that can draw parallels with art, philosophy and literature. There is just a world of beauty that can be accessed in many different ways.”
Balasubramanian joins the Mount Holyoke College physics department after seeing her friends’ experiences in more person-centered college environments, with the added goal of expanding the field of physics for women.
“When I first moved to the U.S., I went to a liberal arts school, but it was a larger college. My closest friends in grad school all went to really small liberal arts colleges; the experience they described as having in their undergraduate life was so different from what I had. And so I was always drawn to these smaller places where you have a lot of personal interaction between the instructor and the student,” Balasubramanian said. “Mount Holyoke really appealed to me because in physics, over the last 20 years, I believe [women] have remained at about 20% of the whole field. Given equal access to educational opportunities, we still are a minority. So, I was very motivated to teach physics here.”
Balasubramanian looks forward to expanding on not only her own physics work but also the work of her students, thanks to the varying specialties available in the physics department. By utilizing spaces such as the Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab, she believes physics can go from abstract and complicated to interesting and accessible.
“Getting your hands dirty and making things in your process of learning — this is something that I’d really like to make use of. The faculty of physics and their expertise is completely different from mine. There are people working on condensed matter and soft materials. These are things that in particle physics we don’t know anything about,” Balasubramanian said. “However, when we build detectors, we use materials to build them. So, there’s a lot to learn in Fimbel, especially, for instance, in the detection of light using photovoltaic cells and so on. So, this is something that I’d like to learn more about from other faculty.”
Balasubramanian says her favorite part of teaching is when a student experiences that “aha” moment.
“I've often been told that there was a physics concept that someone didn’t get before they spoke with me, and then they got it after, or they always thought something was very dull but can see why I’d find it interesting, which, to me, is already a step up, right?” she said.
Balasubramanian will continue her exploration of dark matter and neutrino physics, trying to expand the boundaries of what is known to be possible.
“I have been recently more interested in looking for new, undiscovered particles beyond the standard model of particle physics. I’ve recently become a lot more interested in dark matter searches using neutrino detectors because of the features of the neutrino beam,” Balasubramanian said. “You have a very strong neutrino beam and a very precise neutrino detector; this makes some sort of magic sweet spot where you can now go look for other particles, like dark matter. So, in the longer term, I’d like to continue exploring the boundaries of where experimental neutrino physics can go and what we can do with particle beams to look for in the dark sector.”
