Department of Physics at the U of I

Inga Karliner, a high energy physicist, has done physics research in theoretical and experimental physics. She received her PhD in 1974 at Stanford, working on the relation between constituent quarks and current algebra. She was a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton before coming to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1976. With John Ellis, she developed a test for the vector character of the gluon in e+e- collisions, later confirmed by the experiment. Following this, she worked on the Free Quark Search experiment at SLAC, the CDF experiment at Fermilab, and the SLD experiment at SLAC. She was a member of the CLEO collaboration which has been studying b and c quarks produced at the CESR colliding ring facility at Cornell. Since 2006, she has been working on DECam, a 570 megapixel CCD camera designed for studying the origin of the accelerating universe at Cerro Tololo in Chile. DES took its first light in November 2012, and will continue its survey collecting data on ~3000 Type 1a Supernovae, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, development of Galaxy Clusters, and Weak Gravitational Lensing, to study the properties of "Dark Energy".

Although most of her work has been in high energy physics and observational cosmology, since 1993 Karliner has also led the faculty of the UIUC Physics Department in an effort to build an outstanding outreach program. Inga’s tireless efforts to build and sustain the Saturday Physics for Everyone Program, Science on the Market and many other initiatives to engage the public have been extremely successful. In 2002, she joined the Physics Education Research group where she has concentrated on the development of Interactive Examples for the Physics 100, a transition course created to improve the success rate of engineering student who lack experience in problem solving. She collaborated with Physics Education Research group on Interactive Examples for several other introductory courses.