One of the world’s leading physicists, whose work opened a new way of studying the universe, will deliver the lecture in Karachi on Friday, 25 September 2026.
KARACHI, 6 August 2026. Habib University is honoured to announce Dr Nergis Mavalvala as the tenth speaker in its Yohsin Lecture Series. Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr Mavalvala is an award-winning physicist and a pioneer in the detection of gravitational waves and of quantum measurement science. She will deliver the lecture at Habib University on Friday 25 September 2026.
Dr Mavalvala is among the scientists whose work made possible one of the defining discoveries of the century. As a longtime member of the LIGO collaboration, she helped build the instruments that, in September 2015, achieved the first direct detection of gravitational waves, faint ripples in space and time thrown off by two black holes that collided more than a billion years ago. The detection confirmed a prediction Albert Einstein had made a century earlier, one he doubted could ever be measured, and the discovery was recognised with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. It opened an entirely new way of studying the universe, not by seeing it, but by listening to space and time itself.
Born in Lahore and raised in Karachi, Dr Mavalvala studied at the Convent of Jesus and Mary before leaving for the United States, where she earned her undergraduate degree at Wellesley College and her doctorate at MIT. She is the first woman to lead MIT’s School of Science, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics, a MacArthur Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Yohsin Lecture is Habib University’s flagship public lecture series. Built on the University’s founding philosophy of Yohsin, the thoughtful cultivation of the self, it brings the world’s leading thinkers to Pakistan for public dialogue on the questions shaping our world. Previous speakers include Noam Chomsky, Ashis Nandy, Reza Aslan, Azra Raza and Thomas Blom Hansen. Dr Mavalvala’s lecture marks the tenth edition of the series.
To know more about the 10th Yohsin Lecture, visit the official lecture page.
To register for the lecture, click here.
About Habib University
Habib University is Pakistan’s premier liberal arts and sciences university. Founded in Karachi in 2014, it offers a contextually rooted education with a global outlook, grounded in its philosophy of Yohsin and bringing together the sciences, engineering, arts and humanities. The University is a candidate for accreditation with the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE).
