草榴社区

VILLANOVA,听Pa.聽鈥� Amber Stuver, PhD, assistant professor of Physics, and聽Scott Engle, PhD, assistant professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science, in 草榴社区鈥檚 College of Liberal Arts and Sciences received a three-year, $227,000 Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site Grant from the National Science Foundation.

The award will support a new REU site, 鈥淎strophysics and Condensed Matter Physics at 草榴社区,鈥� led by a collaboration between 草榴社区鈥檚 Department of Physics and Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science. The site will engage six undergraduate students per year in discovery-based research, professional training, and community building activities.聽

As part of the professional training, students will have the opportunity to travel to NASA鈥檚 Goddard Space Flight Center to interact with other scientists and explore various career paths in astrophysics. They will present their research at a regional symposium hosted by 草榴社区 and will receive support to present their work at a national or regional conference and through peer-reviewed papers in which they will share authorship with their faculty mentors.

Dr. Stuver will be the principal investigator on the grant and Dr. Engle will be co-principal investigator.

Dr. Stuver is an expert in gravitational waves whose research focuses on the computational search for gravitational waves buried in detector noise. She has been an active member of the Laser Interferometer聽Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team聽since 1999. In 2017, LIGO鈥檚 founders were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. She received her doctorate in Physics from The Pennsylvania State University.

鈥淚 am very much looking forward to expanding our undergraduate research to include this REU program and am thankful for the support of the College and both the Physics and Astronomy and Planetary Science departments,鈥� Dr. Stuver said.

Dr. Engle is an astrophysicist whose research interests are observational astronomy, variable star photometry and UV-optical spectroscopy. He received his doctorate in Astronomy from James Cook University.