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Taking Physics to the People - Dr. Christina Love

Title: Associate Teaching Professor, Drexel University
Tenured: No
Age: 40
Education: B.S., physics education, West Chester University; M.A., Ph.D., physics, Temple University
Career mentors: Dr. A.J. Nicastro, West Chester University; Dr. Jeff Martoff, Temple University; Dr. Ronald Krauss, Transportation Security Laboratory
Words of wisdom/advice for new faculty: “It sounds silly but say ‘yes’ to the things you want to do and ‘no’ to the things you do not want to do.”Dr. Christina (Christy) LoveDr. Christina (Christy) Love


Since arriving in the physics department at Drexel University 10 years ago, Dr. Christina (Christy) Love has made a significant impact on the institution, leading her department head to describe her influence as “transformative in almost every aspect of our educational, outreach and scholarly mission.”

Dr. David Goldberg recalls that Love was hired when the department was seeking new teaching faculty with a focus on STEM. “I chaired the committee, but as a practical matter, it was a very easy assignment,” Goldberg wrote in his letter nominating Love as an Emerging Scholar. “While there were over 85 outstanding applicants, Dr. Love was in a category of her own.”

Goldberg noted that over the years, Love has lived up to—and exceeded—those first impressions. Notably, as an astroparticle physicist, Love has joined the IceCube collaboration, giving her access to data from the world’s largest neutrino observatory.

Love’s current focus is a web-based citizen science project called Name That Neutrino that she and her students created in 2023, seeking a multitude of volunteers to participate in the process.

“Regardless of their background, volunteers are asked to be a part of STEM research by classifying data for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole,” Love explains in an interview with Diverse.  Her project which is on the Zooniverse platform (Zooniverse.org,) “is available in seven different languages and open to anyone around the world who wants to advance scientific research.”

According to space.com, neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles, often called “ghost particles” because they barely interact with anything else. Neutrinos are, however, the most common particle(s) in the universe.

When a neutrino interacts in ice, a signal or light pattern is produced.

“We’re asking you to watch a clip of the signal and classify the shape. By doing this, you will help IceCube eliminate background signals . . . and your contributions will help train and improve AI algorithms,” Love says on the project’s website. “Our long-term goal is to have citizens and artificial intelligence work in tandem to push the boundaries of neutrino astronomy.”

Through the research, she was able to demonstrate the utility of citizen science for classifying neutrino events in the IceCube detector. This resulted in both a publication and a master’s thesis.

Love also developed and runs an IceCube Citizen Science Program that includes outreach to high school students, immersing them in university-level projects. The research project, IceCube Data Analysis in the U.S. 2022-2025, received funding of $541,879 from the National Science Foundation over three years.

Love’s Ph.D. focused on the direct detection of dark matter with the DarkSide Collaboration, a group of scientists working on the dark matter experiment. She completed her postdoctoral work at the Transportation Security Laboratory working on the detection of explosives with X-ray scanners. Love also collaborated as co-P.I. on a proposal preparing math and science teachers for middle school, resulting in a five-year NSF grant of  $1,199,762.

Among her other projects at Drexel, Love founded Start Talking Science, a non-technical, annual poster conference for the general public. She says her intent was “improving the communication skills of STEM researchers while also allowing the public to discuss current research with the actual researchers.” Love created the program after realizing from her own experience how difficult it was to explain her research on dark matter, even when talking to other scientists.

Since arriving at Drexel, Love has also designed eight new courses including introduction to experimental physics for physics majors and computational labs for media art majors.

Love is active in STEM mentoring and enrichment programs that target students, especially girls, in high school and the lower grades. As a past president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Association for Women in Science, she has coordinated various STEM initiatives that included organizing an after-school science club at a local elementary school.

The next step with Start Talking Science is performing an assessment and expanding to other areas. Love notes that she already has a collaborator who is interested in reproducing the program in North Carolina.

The whole idea of citizen science fits into Love’s goal of sharing scientific research and knowledge with those outside of the field and even outside of academia.

“A lot of times people don’t necessarily know that they can make a difference regardless of what their background is or what they think they’re capable of doing,” Love says, adding, “The essence of citizen science is that we’re trying to find people who aren’t physicists or [other scientists].”

Accordingly, Love says the next step with Name That Neutrino is having more non-science majors involved. “Just because you aren’t a physics or STEM major doesn’t mean you can’t be a part of this project in some way. . . and that’s what I’m tapping into, trying out different things.”


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