Multiverse is a mission driven 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a passionate and active board.
Anna Barnacka
Dr. Anna Barnacka, a NASA Einstein Fellow at Harvard, was trained to solve the unsolvable. While researching black holes billions of miles away, she realized she had no precise visibility into the inner workings of her own internal galaxy. Anna decided to listen to her brain—both figuratively and literally. She leveraged her expertise to create a sound system with the power to accurately capture her unique health data and deliver real-time guidance to improve her life.
Her innovation worked so well that she is now making the technology available to others seeking long-term health with the simplicity of wearing a set of earbuds. She is now the founder, CEO, and first customer of MindMics.
Sherie Bush
Sherie Bush is a former partner at a major international law firm where her law practice focused on capital markets and commercial finance, and is the Founder and Managing Member of West Highland Placement, a national search firm engaged in recruiting attorneys for law firms and in-house legal departments.
A lifetime devotee and patron of the arts, with a particular love for classical music, Sherie has served in many volunteer roles, including Chairman of the Board and Development Director of the Atlanta Lyric Theatre, on the Board of Directors of the Georgia Academy of Music, in the development office for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, as Development Director for the American Baroque Orchestra, and on the Board of Directors of the Monomoy Theatre in Chatham, MA.
Sherie graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Emory University where she double-majored in Political Science and Music (piano) and from Emory University School of Law, where she served as the Editor in Chief of the inaugural edition of the Emory Bankruptcy Law Journal.
With her husband, Walter, Sherie currently resides in Boston and Chatham, Massachusetts.
David Ibbett - President
David Ibbett, Ph.D. is a composer, educator and musical advocate for science. His lifelong passion for science began with his father, Dr. Roger Ibbett, who is a research chemist in Nottingham, UK
In 2020, David was the first Guest Composer at Fermilab, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2023, he was named the first Resident Composer at Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
Read about David’s work in Nature “The Sound of Stars”
David is an Assistant Professor of Music at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and maintains a close association with Berklee College of Music.
David composes electrosymphonic music: a fusion of classical and electronic styles that interweaves influences from songs, symphonies, pop, rock and electronica. Musical strands are met with inspiration from the work of scientists: sonified data, musical metaphors for scientific concepts, and experimental sound and images from contemporary research.
In all projects, David seeks a deep collaboration with musicians, scientists, artists and performers. He has worked with physicists (Dr. Mathew Kleban, NYU), biologists (Dr. Paul Garrity, Brandeis), engineers (Dr. Irmgard Bischofberger, MIT), sociologists (Dr. Clara Han, Johns Hopkins), astrophysicists (Dr. Priya Natarajan, Yale) and oceanographers (Dr. Sarah Davies, BU). Recent works include Cellular Dance (2019) a ballet on a theme of cell movement with biologist Alexey Veraksa of UMass Boston, Octave of Light (2020) an album of exoplanet music, Black Hole Symphony (2022) and Mars Symphony (2024) orchestral journeys through spacetime at the Museum of Science, Boston, Christa McAuliffe Center, and planetariums nationwide.
Sarah Ibbett - Treasurer
Sarah Ibbett, violin. In addition to premiering new solo works, Ms. Ibbett plays in the Lexington Symphony and leads the second violins in the Lowell Chamber Orchestra. She has also performed in several ensembles that specialize in historical performance, including the Hanover Band, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Apollo’s Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra. She has performed many times on NPR and on BBC Radio 3. She also performs with her string quartet Fin de Siecle, which specializes in period performances of works from the early 20th century.
Ms. Ibbett holds a Bachelor in Music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, a Masters in Music from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and a Performance Diploma from Boston University.
Sarah is a member of the Suzuki Massachusetts Board of Directors. She has taught at Suzuki institutes and workshops around the country and has given presentations at national Suzuki conferences. She proudly teaches Suzuki violin lessons at the Ibbett Music Studio in Burlington, Massachusetts.
She moved to Massachusetts from the UK where she played violin with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the London Handel Orchestra, the Hanover Band, the Purcell Orchestra, the London Orchestra da Camera, and Florilegium. She currently plays with a variety of ensembles in the Boston area including Grand Harmonie and the Lexington Symphony.
Mrs. Ibbett grew up in Kansas City where she was a Suzuki student herself, studying with Beth Titterington, Stephanie Sandven, and Eleanor Allen.
Raja Palanimurugan
Raja works in the Signal Processing and Communications group at MathWorks. My current work is centered around the creation of MATLAB apps that enhance audio algorithm development, advance audio visualization, streamline audio dataset creation and labeling, and perform state-of-the-art impulse response measurements. His expertise extends to the design and development of software scopes, namely Spectrum Analyzer, Time Scope, and Array Plot, alongside a few other signal visualization tools, filter design apps, and MATLAB System objects for adaptive filters.
Holding a Master's degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, his academic background is in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. My academic background is further enriched by his role as a Research Assistant at the Medical Intelligence and Language Engineering Lab, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), where he developed a machine-learning based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for Tamil and Kannada languages.
Winfield Perry
President and Chairman of Winbro Group Ltd. and Director and founder of Flow Grinding Corp. Both companies are located in Woburn, Massachusetts. For fifty years, Dr. Perry has helped to develop non-traditional machining technologies and advanced manufacturing methods. Winbro Group also makes early stage investments in technology compnies.
From 1975 until the present, he has been an officer at various Winbro Group companies providing capital equipment and services for the aerospace and semiconductor equipment indusries. In 2011, Dr. Perry cofounded Flow Grinding Corp. with his son Luke to manufacture machining systems for Abrasive Flow Machining and Electrochemical Deburring.
He and his wife Linda are enthusiastic fans and supporters of opera, ballet, classical music and theater. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Lyric Opera, and Multiverse Concert Series.
Dr. Perry graduated from Harvard College in 1970 earning an AB in Chemistry. In 1975 he received a Ph.D. also in Chemistry from the University of California Berkeley.
Irene Porro
Dr. Irene Porro is the Director of the Christa McAuliffe Center for Integrated Science Learning at Framingham State University. She also
leads the MetroWest STEM Education Network, one of nine regional networks established to support the goals of the Massachusetts STEM Council. For the past twenty five years she has been serving in leadership positions at both private and public institutions of higher education and she has been responsible for the growth and management of a rich portfolio of informal science learning experiences for audiences of all ages. These experiences range from youth programs to museum exhibit development, from science festivals to planetarium and science theater performances. Her professional expertise, however, is centered on fostering the creative and human capacity of high school age youth through apprenticeship and mentoring programs which use STEM as an empowering tool for social change. Using a system thinking approach, she has been recruiting teams of professionals from diverse fields and backgrounds whose perspectives and expertise have been critical in the design of programs that integrate the learning of STEM within historical, social, and cultural contexts relevant to the life of the youth we serve.
Irene received her Ph.D. in Space Science and Technology from the University of Padova, Italy. Before entering the field of education, she was a researcher in astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Max Planck Institut für Astronomie, in Heidelberg, Germany. She then joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she became the Director of the Education and Outreach Group of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.