Delilah Gates

Delilah Gates is a fifth-year Harvard University physics graduate student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow studying high spin black holes and gravity, primarily focused on predicting observational signals of black holes for the Event Horizon Telescope. Her research interests include extremal black hole geometries, black hole binaries, AdS/CFT correspondence, and black hole entropy. She has studied cosmology, black hole astrophysics, and supersymmetry; and has also worked in high energy experimental physics with the CMS Experiment at CERN. In 2015, Delilah graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) as a Banneker-Key Scholar, earning two Bachelors of Science, one in physics and one in mathematics.

Delilah has dedicated herself to building support programs within the physics community.As a three-year UMD Society of Physics Students president, she organized a daily peer-tutoring program for physics majors and the department's first annual Undergraduate Research Fair and Showcase. At Harvard, she is a member of the Physics Graduate Student Council (PGSC), which focuses on improving the wellbeing of students. She has taken part in overseeing workshops and the annual graduate student climate survey.  Delilah will serve as PGSC president for the 2019-2020 academic year.

With a mindfulness towards equity, Delilah has served on a number of organizing committees: (a) 2014 and 2019 UMD-NIST Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics(CUWiP), (b) the Harvard 2017 CUWiP, (c) Supporting Inclusion of Underrepresented Peoples Workshop, and (d) the 2016 and 2017 UMD-NIST Conferences for Undergraduate Underrepresented Minorities in Physics. She helped initiate Women Physics mentoring programs at UMD and Harvard and develop a workshop on race, gender, and sciencefor teaching assistants.