Ágnes Mócsy

Mócsy grew up in the Transylvania region of Romania, where she was a part of the Hungarian minority in the region.[1] She completed her bachelor's degree at Babeș-Bolyai University in 1989.[2] She went on to earn a master's degree physics at the University of Bergen. She then moved to the University of Minnesota, culminating in a PhD in physics.[3][4] Her thesis focused on the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics.[5] In particular, she studied quarkonia.[6]

She was a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt, the Niels Bohr Institute as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, and the RIKEN-BNL research center at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Mócsy joined the Pratt Institute in 2008, where she teaches astronomy and physics for architects and designers.[7] She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016 for her innovative exploration of the intersection of science and art.[5][8] In 2017 Mócsy's first documentary film, Smashing Matters: Behind the Science Scene, premiered at the New Haven Documentary Film Festival.[9] The film looks behind the scenes at the international conference Quark Matters and explores the work that goes on at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and Large Hadron Collider.[9] She screened the film at CERN in February 2017.[10] For 2018 and 2019, Mócsy is a Visiting Professor in the Physics Department at Yale University.[11] Mócsy is on the board of SistersMATR, a public engagement project that looks to engage young women of colour in physics.[12][13] She has written for HuffPost on the popular misconception that discoveries in physics are made by lone, usually male geniuses.[14]