Ericka Florio
Bio:
Ericka Florio, class of 2022, traveled a long, long ways from Seattle, Washington to attend Kenyon College, where she soon discovered that pondering deep questions about the physical nature of reality was the life she was meant to lead. She began attending Cosmology group meetings in the fall of 2018, and embarked on her first semester of research with Cosmo Lab in the spring of 2019. She spent her first two years in Cosmo lab studying the Early Dark Energy (EDE) field, a proposed solution to the Hubble tension which introduces the presence of a light scalar field near matter-radiation equality. She has also studied various quartic inflation models in order to determine whether or not these models could produce primordial black holes. She is currently starting a new project which seeks to understand how black holes and scalar fields might interact.
When she is not fighting with Mathematica, Ericka can most often be found in the dance studio, curled up with a good book or her sketch pad, or hiking somewhere along the Kokosing Gap Trail.
