Title: Associate Teaching Professor, Drexel University
Tenured: No
Age: 40
Education: B.S., physics education, West Chester University; M.A., Ph.D., physics, Temple University
Career mentors: Dr. A.J. Nicastro, West Chester University; Dr. Jeff Martoff, Temple University; Dr. Ronald Krauss, Transportation Security Laboratory
Words of wisdom/advice for new faculty: “It sounds silly but say ‘yes’ to the things you want to do and ‘no’ to the things you do not want to do.”
Dr. Christina (Christy) Love
Since arriving in the physics department at Drexel University 10 years ago, Dr. Christina (Christy) Love has made a significant impact on the institution, leading her department head to describe her influence as “transformative in almost every aspect of our educational, outreach and scholarly mission.”
Dr. David Goldberg recalls that Love was hired when the department was seeking new teaching faculty with a focus on STEM. “I chaired the committee, but as a practical matter, it was a very easy assignment,” Goldberg wrote in his letter nominating Love as an Emerging Scholar. “While there were over 85 outstanding applicants, Dr. Love was in a category of her own.”
Goldberg noted that over the years, Love has lived up to—and exceeded—those first impressions. Notably, as an astroparticle physicist, Love has joined the IceCube collaboration, giving her access to data from the world’s largest neutrino observatory.
Love’s current focus is a web-based citizen science project called Name That Neutrino that she and her students created in 2023, seeking a multitude of volunteers to participate in the process.
“Regardless of their background, volunteers are asked to be a part of STEM research by classifying data for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole,” Love explains in an interview with Diverse. Her project which is on the Zooniverse platform (Zooniverse.org,) “is available in seven different languages and open to anyone around the world who wants to advance scientific research.”
