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Jennie Traschen

Traschen took three years to graduate from Averill Park High SchoolinRensselaer, New York, in 1974. She went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with the support of a National Merit Scholarship and New York State Regent's Scholarship,^[1] graduating in 1977.^[2]

She traveled to the University of Cambridge on a Churchill Scholarship for the Mathematical Tripos, and earned a master's degree there. She returned to the US for doctoral study in general relativityatHarvard University, earning her Ph.D. in 1984.^[2]

She became a faculty member at Amherst after postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago and University of California, Santa Barbara.^[2]

Traschen's research has included work with Robert Geroch critiquing certain approximations used in string theory^[3] and defining a "maximally reasonable" class of Pseudo-Riemannian manifolds called the Geroch–Traschen metrics.^[4]

Inblack hole cosmology, Traschen is known for her work with David Kastor on multi-black-hole solutions to the equations of general relativity.^[5]

She is also known for her work in cosmological perturbation theory, on integral constraint vectors of spacelike hypersurfaces.^[6][7]

In 2006, Traschen was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), after a nomination from the APS Division of Gravitational Physics, "for her ground-breaking contributions to early universe cosmology and black hole physics".^[8]

In 2001, Traschen became infamous nationally for her suggestion at a meeting of the Amherst, Massachusetts select board that money from a fund for veteran services that had been used to purchase US flags would have been better spent on education and health care for veterans.^[9][10] The unfortunate timing of her remarks, the day before the September 11 attacks, and the inflammatory wording of her statement, led her to become a national "target of harassment and hate".^[10]

Traschen has also worked to encourage more women to enter theoretical physics, by organizing workshops aimed at greater inclusiveness^[11] and decrying the phenomenon in which some contributors to joint research are seen as invisible or negligible and excluded from recognition.^[2][11]

Traschen is the daughter of Isadore "Ike" Traschen,^[1] a professor of literature at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a leader in protests against the Vietnam War at Rensselaer.^[12] She is married to David Kastor, also a physicist at UMass Amherst. Their daughter, Kalyani Kastor,^[13] is a professional illustrator.^[14]

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