About

SPIDER and me on hang test day.

My name is Anne Gambrel, and I’m a fourth year grad student in physics at Princeton University. I have devoted the most recent years of my life to the SPIDER experiment, a balloon-borne CMB polarimeter that will measure the polarization of the oldest light we can see in the universe. We hope that by studying this light with greater sensitivity than any experiment before, we will be able to answer questions about what was happening in the first fraction of a second after the big bang.

SPIDER is designed to fly on a stratospheric balloon launched from Antarctica. We successfully launched on January 1, 2015, after two months of preparation on the Ice. I’ve chronicled our Antarctic journey here. For more background, check out my first post.

Right now, the only way to get ahold of me is: agambrel@princeton.edu.