Article by Amy Zheng Juan C. Vasquez Carmona is a visiting assistant professor of physics. He is the current Chair of the New England section of the American Physical Society and a full-time member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. This academic year is his first time instructing physics at Amherst College. This…
Hi there! My name is Alison Weiss, and I am a rising senior at Amherst. This summer, I am working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland. As a physics and computer science double major, it is exciting to be spending the summer at the place where both the Higgs boson…
On March 29, Presidential Scholar Chanda Prescod-Weinstein gave a talk in the Science Center called “Cosmic Probes of the Dark Sector.” Prescod-Weinstein is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She began her talk by telling the audience that “there are no stupid questions,…
As one of the postdocs who mentored the LIGO SURF program put it, there are five goals to an REU, which are, in order of importance: Safety and health Have fun I learn something My mentors learn something The project A major aim of a summer research internship is to learn what it means to…
Still image from a numerical simulation of a black hole / neutron star merger. Image credit: S.V.Chaurasia (Stockholm University), T. Dietrich (Potsdam University and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), N. Fischer, S. Ossokine, H. Pfeiffer (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), ,https://www.ligo.org/detections/NSBH2020/files/BHNS_GW200115.png. Scientists have long predicted that neutron stars and black holes could orbit…
Hi, everyone! I’m Cailin Plunkett, a rising junior majoring in physics and mathematics. This summer, I’m researching gravitational waves through the Caltech LIGO SURF program. Electromagnetic (EM) radiation—like infrared, visible light, UV, etc—is the type of data we are used to receiving from space. The first telescopes looked at stars and planets in the visible…
The following was adapted from a Zoom interview between Sarah Lapean and Annika Lunstad. Annika is a physics and math double major. She came to Amherst wanting to study physics, but without a clear idea of where she wanted to go with it. The summer after her freshman year, she participated in the Summer Science…
In the early weeks of Fall 2016, Prof. Janice Hudgings of Pomona College tasked the sophomores in her Modern Physics course with identifying the scientists whose work was presented in the course textbook. The results: of the credited scientists, 99% were male, and 98% were white. These statistics are only the beginning. Since the late…
Considering applying for STEM internships? Interested in experiences inside or outside of academia? Unsure how to get funding for these exciting opportunities (as a U.S. citizen, international, or undocumented student)? It can be hard to find summer opportunities while studying for midterms and completing coursework. Fortunately, Spectra (Amherst College’s very own Physics, Biophysics, and Astronomy…
Hey everyone! Sorry it has taken so long from my first blog post to this one, it has been a busy summer filled with lots of cool science. For my last two blog posts, I am going to talk about my experience with remote research and then in the second one what motivates me to…