Catherine Whiting, PhD, teaches introductory- and sophomore-level physics and astronomy courses, as well as upper level advanced courses such as General Relativity. Students in her classes develop skills to solve fun and challenging problems by participating in class, collaborating with classmates and doing in depth projects. They learn about how fascinating our universe is and how things we encounter in our everyday lives can be explained from very basic principles.
Whiting has been working on applications of a newly developed model of gravity that is an extension of Einstein's General Relativity theory. This model has the potential to help us understand the very early universe, the theoretical origin of black holes, dark matter, dark energy and perhaps many other open questions in cosmology and particle physics.
More recently, she has been working with CMU students to hunt for exoplanets using the transit method. These are planets that orbit stars other than our own. They monitor the brightness of a star over time and watch for a dip in brightness when a planet passes in front of its host star and blocks some of the light. CMU has a special partnership with the US Air Force Academy to use their Falcon Telescope Network, an array of 13 identical research grade telescopes located around the world and one of them is located here at the Grand Mesa Observatory.
Whiting and her campus-known dog, Roxie, love to explore the beautiful outdoors the western slope has to offer.
