Nicole Lloyd-Ronning

Nicole Lloyd-Ronning is an astrophysicist in the Computational Physics and Methods group (CCS-2) at Los Alamos National Lab, and teaches physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos.  She models the multi-scale physics behind the bright, explosive deaths of very massive stars, the black holes they create, the jets they launch, and uses these explosions as tools to learn about star formation and their evolution in our universe.  She is the author of Great Mysteries in Astrophysics: A Guide to What We Don’t Know, a book about the most pressing unsolved puzzles in our universe. She left the field in 2004, but came back in 2015 determined to improve the culture in physics and astrophysics. She helps facilitate and shares leadership of LANL’s APS Inclusivity Diversity and Equity Alliance, and works as part of several other Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging focus groups.  She grew up all over the U.S. and Germany, moving about every two years, and graduated high school in Honolulu, Hawaii. She received her B.A. in physics from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University, and has been living in and loving New Mexico since 2003.