Welcome. I am James Battat, a Pappalardo Fellow in the Physics Department at MIT. My research addresses a major conundrum in physics: what is the nature of the dark energy and the dark matter that together comprise 96% of the mass-energy in the Universe? In addition, since the evidence for dark energy relies on General Relativity, I am also involved in a high-precision test of gravity via Lunar Laser Ranging. Check out my Research page for a description of how I measure the Earth-Moon distance to a precision of a millimeter (that's nearly a part in a trillion of the 384,000 km distance).

While I was a graduate student in the Astronomy Department at Harvard University, I served as a Teaching Fellow in several courses (undergraduate and graduate, for both majors and non). I developed and co-taught a sophomore tutorial for astronomy majors and have lectured in the advanced undergraduate astrophysics course. Please see Teaching for details.

In addition, I have worked extensively with the Harvard Instructional Computing Group to develop software and applications to enrich classroom learning in both science and non-science courses.

Based on design by Andres Viklund. See http://andreasviklund.com