OPP welcomes Dr. Marion Dierickx as new Antarctic Sciences program director

Dr. Marion Dierickx joins the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs as a program director in the Antarctic Astrophysics and Geospace and Cyberinfrastructure programs. Dierickx comes to OPP from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston, MA, where she worked as a research scientist.

An experimental astrophysicist with broad expertise in computational simulations, telescope instrumentation and operations, Dierickx earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2017. Her research is on conducting cosmic microwave background polarization measurements from the South Pole, searching for primordial gravitational waves left behind by the big bang. As a member of the BICEP/Keck and CMB-S4 collaborations, Dierickx's work spanned receiver cryogenic and optical design, optimizing survey uptime and sensitivity, and planning field deployments and infrastructure.