Meet the 2026 Emmy Noether emerging talent fund recipients

The Emmy Noether Emerging Talent Fund was created and is sustained by a dedicated group of generous donors. It supports women in their PhD studies at Perimeter Institute. As one of the world’s top research centres, PhD training here opens life-changing career opportunities for these exceptional young talents.

Here are the recipients of the 2026 Emmy Noether Emerging Talent Fund.

Sofia Chiarenza: Using big data and big ideas to study the Universe

Sofia Chiarenza is fascinated by big topics. As a child, she looked into the night sky and pondered its vastness and how it had stared at all the previous generations of humanity, when it came time to apply to university, she was eager to pursue physics.

“I was in high school and had to make a decision,” she recalls about that time. “The coolest part of physics to me, is still astrophysics and general relativity.”

It was in her undergraduate that she discovered the biggest topic of them all: cosmology, the study of the universe itself. She wrote her final undergraduate paper on how the universe grew and evolved, using machine learning to study the massive amounts of data from various current experiments.

It’s this interplay of data from experiments and theory that Chiarenza loves. “We have sound models that work very well, and we know exactly how they work,” she explains. “It’s really cool that we can explain basically the whole evolutionary history of the universe from the beginning to the end with a model that is quite simple and that we can fit very well.”

While the models work, Chiarenza’s research probes at the questions they haven’t answered yet. Her supervisor is Perimeter Research Associate Faculty member Will Percival, who developed massive 3D maps of galaxy clustering patterns to reveal the physics of the early universe. She uses these galaxy surveys to analyze the universe. She is especially interested in measuring inflation parameters or how the Universe has expanded as it has evolved.

“I do mostly observational cosmology,” she explains. “I work with survey data including DESI, which is this huge collaboration using a telescope in Arizona. I take the data from the catalogues of galaxies to estimating like parameters. I do the whole pipeline basically.”

Chiarenza is grateful for the Emmy Noether Emerging Talent Award, which provides financial support and the chance to focus fully on her research. And she has a lot of work ahead of her. “It’s always nice to get recognition for all the work you do because I’ve been working a lot,” she says with a laugh. “Especially in the past year and a half. Being involved with DESI, now I have three or four projects going on at the same time.”

“There’s a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of survey data incoming, so it’s a very active time. That is super fun.”

Yasamin Panahi: Taking big risks to pursue her passion

Yasamin Panahi takes big swings. Even at a young age, she challenged herself and took risks in her pursuit of knowledge.

It was in high school in her home country of Iran that Panahi first became interested in physics, through classes taught by university professors in her hometown aiming to encourage students to compete in national Science Olympiads. She decided to take the plunge and enter the competition.

“Before those classes, my impression of physics was that you just had to know which equations described which phenomena,” she says. “But when physics was presented at a more advanced level, I began to understand the ideas behind those mathematical expressions. I took great joy from that.”

The rewards for winning a gold medal in Science Olympiads were big: your choice of university and program. But preparing for the Olympiad also meant taking a risk. In Iran, undergraduate admissions work through a national entrance exam covering all subjects taught during the final years of high school, so focusing on one subject for the Olympiad meant sacrificing time that could have gone toward the university entrance exam, a trade-off that only paid off by winning at the Olympiad competitions. “Because of the risks, very few students wanted to participate in the Olympiads, which made it harder to find Olympiad classes at school,” she says. “I realized that I had to become very self-reliant.”

Despite needing to catch up for the entrance exam, Panahi did gain acceptance to Sharif University of Technology, often called the “MIT of Iran.”

The pandemic hit while she was in university. And while many struggled with lockdowns, Panahi thrived. “I think my experience studying for the Olympiad on my own really helped me keep the momentum during the lockdown,” she recalls. “It was just me and the physics textbooks again, but this time I had the bonus of online lectures from really good professors.”

After her undergrad, Panahi was accepted to multiple PhD programs in the US, but she again took a risk. She decided to defer her PhD and instead come to Perimeter Institute for the Perimeter Scholars International (PSI) program. It was her former senior classmates Amirreza Negari and Saba Etezad-Razavi, both PSI graduates, who encouraged her to go. “I was between choosing a PhD or PSI here, and Saba and Amirreza encouraged me a lot,” she says. “I decided to accept PSI and do this one-year master’s program because it was exciting.”

During PSI, Panahi began working with her now-supervisor Chong Wang, known for his discoveries of exotic phases of quantum matter. After PSI, however, visa issues prevented her from attending her PhD program.

Disappointed, she headed home but refused to give up. She decided to take another risk: come back to PI as a research assistant rather than doing her PhD elsewhere. While back in Canada, she could reapply for her visa to do her PhD here.

The plan worked. Panahi officially became a PhD student in January under the supervision of Chong Wang and Anton Burkov, studying how quantum materials behave in a messy and noisy environment, and exploring what new phenomena emerge once the usual simplifying assumptions in describing quantum many-body systems are relaxed.

Panahi is grateful for the support from the Emmy Noether Emerging Talent Fund and a program that helps researchers early in their careers. “It’s really nice that there is support for people like us. It may take decades for the impact of our work to be felt,” she says. “But many of the technologies we have today are built on theories in physics developed more than a century ago. Acknowledging that and supporting physicists who just do theory, is really meaningful.”

Now, Panahi is excited to continue her research. “Physicists really enjoy what they do. I think that’s the main reason we continue doing it,” she says. “Every day feels different because you’re thinking and learning about new things, and you just keep challenging yourself. That’s the real joy.”