Congratulations to Rose Powers who was awarded a 2024 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP) and to Tristan Weaver YC’23 and Catherine Zhang who received honorable mentions.
The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $37,000 and a cost of education allowance of $16,000 to the institution. Click here for a list of awardees.
Brief bios of this year’s awardees are included below:
Fellow
Rose Powers is a Physics (Intensive) major working with Sarah Demers, professor of physics and a member of Yale’s Wright Lab. Rose’s research in the area of high-energy particle experiment focuses mainly on software development for event reconstruction and trigger systems—she spent two summers at Fermilab with the Mu2e experiment and is currently collaborating on software R&D for the future Muon Collider effort. Rose is involved with the physics community on campus as a part of Yale’s Society of Physics Students (SPS) branch, where she served as outreach co-chair during the 2022-23 academic year. She is passionate about physics education; and serving as a peer tutor for the PHYS200/201 course sequence has been a highlight of her college years. Rose is deeply honored to be offered the NSF GRFP and is excited to continue contributing to muon collider research and development (R&D) in the coming years.
Demers said, “I’ve had the privilege of working with Rose for several years. She began her work in my group on Mu2e, an experiment at Fermilab that will hunt for charged lepton flavor violation, with contributions to the trigger for the experiment. More recently she has been carrying out studies investigating the feasibility of a detector at a potential future muon collider. She did remarkable work in both contexts, building up a fan club among my colleagues, who expressed shock regularly that she wasn’t already a graduate student. She is not only a phenomenal and independent researcher, but she also contributes to our department as a peer tutor and mentor. The NSF chose very well!”
Honorable Mentions
Tristan Weaver ’23 completed his B.S. in December 2022 with a double major in Physics (Int.) and Mathematics (Int.). Since then, he has worked as a post-baccalaureate researcher with the astronomy department. His advisors are Meg Urry, with whom he has worked since 2019, and Daisuke Nagai, with whom he has worked since 2023. His NSF proposal, “Joint X-ray-FIR Spectroscopy to Probe Scale of AGN Obscuration”, is an extension to a paper written with the Urry Group currently awaiting review by the Astrophysical Journal. His current research interests include cosmology, Large-Scale Structure, and ML. In Fall 2024, he will begin his PhD at Penn State University in Astronomy and Astrophysics with a minor in Computational Science studying theoretical cosmology under Donghui Jeong.
Undergraduate student Catherine Zhang is a physics & geosciences major