Joanne Cohn

Joanne Cohn is an American cosmologist who worked in string theory early on. She is also known for her role in the creation of the ArXiv.org e-print archive. Cohn is a Senior Space Fellow and Full Researcher at the Space Sciences Lab of University of California, Berkeley.

Cohn grew up in Denver, Colorado and became interested in becoming a physicist after learning about special relativity around the age of 11, from a library book. After graduating from Denver’sThomas Jefferson High School, she attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude in 1983 with an AB in physics. She spent her college summers first working with David Winn on the Harvard-Wisconsin-Purdue proton decay experiment and then with Bill Ford and Jim Smith at the University of Colorado (part of the MAC ee detector located at SLAC)

She earned a Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Chicago, where she wrote her dissertation on superstring theory with her advisors Daniel Friedan and Stephen Shenker. She was then a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1988-1991), followed by positions in the Fermilab Particle Theory Group (1991-1993) and the University of California, Berkeley (1993-1996). She was a 1996-1997 Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. From 1997 -1999, she was a visiting research assistant professor in the department of astronomy and the department of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, followed by being a Research Associate at Harvard College Observatoryuntil 2002. Cohn then returned to Berkeley as a lecturer and assistant researcher/senior fellow at Space Sciences Laboratory, eventually becoming a full researcher in 2013.