Merritt Moore is a ballet dancer and quantum physicist, continually jumping from lab shoes to pointe shoes, from lab goggles to tutus. She has danced as a member of the Zurich Ballet, Boston Ballet, English National Ballet and London Contemporary Ballet Theatre while graduating with honours in physics at Harvard, and graduating with a PhD in Quantum Optics at Oxford University.
She was award Forbes 30 under 30 in 2018 and featured in "Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls", alongside inspiring women such as Oprah, Angela Merkel, JK Rowling and Audrey Hepburn. She was one of the 12 selected astronaut candidates, out of thousands of applicants, to undergo rigorous astronaut selection on BBC Two "Astronauts: Do you have what it takes?", and she continues to pursue the dream of becoming an astronaut, while pursuing a professional ballet and physics career.
Merritt has had enough of hearing that it is only possible to pursue dance or physics. She has worked hard to juggle both to prove that the arts and sciences are not mutually exclusive. She works to inspire young girls and boys by showing them that there is no ‘standard’ personality or path for doing so.
Currently Merritt works at the intersection of science and art- spearheading a movement which integrates the two. Whether it be at the Barbican, Imagine Science Festival, or for the London Design Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum, she creates state-of-the-art work that integrates quantum physics and dance in the form of VR films, dance installations with robots, or online content.
Merritt has integrated her love for physics and dance for a TEDx talk at Oxford and for the international "Dance Your PhD" contest (and won the Physics category). She has been on the organizing committee for the Oxford Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) UK 2016 and was awarded Top Ten College Women of 2010 by Glamour Magazine and the Suzanne Farrell Award at Harvard. She was awarded the Michael von Clemm Fellowship (award to only one Harvard student a year) to study at Oxford.
You can follow Merritt on Instagram/Twitter (at)PhysicsonPointe or get in touch on http://physicsonpointe.com/contact/ .
