When Zeineb Mezghanni `25 first arrived at Grinnell College, the first thing she noticed was the sky.
“We went outside and we looked up and we saw the stars,” she recalled. “It was such a magical moment, because I grew up in a big city where I never saw stars like that.”
Originally from Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, Mezghanni is the first Tunisian student at Grinnell in a decade, and she’s more than lived up to the distinction. A double major in physics and mathematics, she found Grinnell while on a high school exchange program in Ohio.
“I liked the idea of coming to school here, and being able to choose your own classes,” she said. “In Tunisia, we have majors in high school. So I majored in math and physics, and I liked it, but I didn’t know what to do.”
That changed during her first year at Grinnell. Taking physics courses helped spark her academic direction.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ you can do research. This is crazy,” she said. “The department really brought me, and it felt so nice. I loved everyone. So I continued taking more physics classes.”
Her passion for math was reignited thanks to a course with Professor Christopher French.
“He just brought that back in me, like me liking doing math and writing books and everything,” she said. “I ended up doing that as a second major, and it’s been great.”
Throughout her time at Grinnell, Mezghanni has been deeply involved in the physics community, serving on the physics Student Educational Policy Committee (SEPC) and participating in Gender Minorities in Physics (GMIP).
After attending physics seminars, Mezghanni had a vision: she wanted to do research.
“I come from a country where the weather is so nice, so in the summer, everybody goes to the beach — nobody does work,” she laughed.
But her summers were packed with groundbreaking science. After her first year, she worked on quantum computing research with University of Iowa Professor Yannick Meurice. “We would create labs explaining quantum mechanics,” she said.
For the next two summers, she headed to MIT. In her second summer, she worked under Professor Lina Necib. “It was a very happy coincidence, because I had seen her name on the American Physical Society,” Mezghanni said. “We were looking at how galaxies in the universe move around each other and how they come close to each other and then merge into one bigger one.”
In her third summer, she shifted focus again at MIT, this time to the study of black holes. “I worked on studying black holes and how they form,” she said.
This semester, Mezghanni continued her research path with Professor Charlotte Christensen at Grinnell.
In the fall, she’ll return to MIT, this time as a PhD student in Physics.
Though her parents work in management, a completely different field, Mezghanni says they’ve always supported her academic interests.
“I go home and my dad is asking me all these questions about my galaxies and they want to look at my plots from my research. They’re very, very supportive of it.”
Reflecting on her time at Grinnell, Mezghanni said, “I don’t think I expected things to evolve the way they did, but I’m very glad it did so.”
