Chiara Mingarelli, assistant professor of physics, was recently invited to be a guest of honor at one of 28 dinners held as part of a celebration marking the 31st anniversary of Leadership, Education, and Athletics in Partnership (LEAP)’s “LEAP Year Event”.
LEAP is a New Haven-based organization structured to provide supplemental educational programming to children from historically under-resourced neighborhoods. The organization operates on a tiered mentorship framework, employing local high school and university students to deliver literacy, STEM, and athletics curricula to children ages 7 to 12. The operational objective is to mitigate systemic educational disparities and summer learning loss through direct, year-round intervention.
The dinner was held at the home of Rick Antle, William S. Beinecke Professor of Accounting, and his wife Nancy where Mingarelli spoke about supermassive black holes, and the ripples in the fabric of spacetime that they create when they merge. She stated, “There were about 20 guests at the dinner that Rick and Nancy hosted at their home. Guests engaged with me both during the presentation and during a Q&A that lasted over an hour afterwards. It was great fun, and I hope to do it again next year!
I was thrilled to read that the overall event (all the dinners) raised $600k this year!”
Antle commented, “Chiara treated the attendees to a marvelous trip where they encountered black holes, colliding black holes, gravitational waves, and the General Relativity perspective that underlies our understanding of them. It is safe to say that the audience was enraptured.
Chiara also provided a glimpse inside the engine that creates this knowledge: theory, experiment and analysis.
When you consider that this was all done with a group composed of physics enthusiasts, not experts, Chiara’s talk was even more impressive, and Nancy and I would love to host a dinner with her as the guest of honor any time.
I’ve been on the board of LEAP for a few years now, and I have personally seen what great work it does for New Haven and the youth of New Haven in particular.”