Provides financial assistance to qualified undergraduate students majoring in Astrophysics in the School of Physics and Astronomy. It recognizes the importance of astrophysics as a core science and aims to encourage capable and motivated students to pursue careers in this discipline.
Luke Kathmann: "My main research interests are in space plasma physics, specifically regarding plasma waves and kinetic/MHD simulations. Most of my research as an undergrad focused on observations and characteristics of waves from Parker Solar Probe data, however, I also did a summer project with particle simulations in Earth's magnetosphere. In grad school I plan to continue my work with numerical simulations of space plasmas, likely with simulations of the global heliosphere where the solar wind interacts with the partially ionized local interstellar medium."
2022 Swanson Scholarship Recipients
Giulia-Maria Bulugean
"I am from Romania. All my family still lives in my home town, in Craiova. This scholarship will help me to continue my research and also to attend Astrophysics and Physics conferences and workshops that would provide a great support in extending my knowledge and passion as I am currently trying to attend the 240th meeting of the AAS. I started doing research since I was in high school and then I continued in college from the very beginning of the freshman year, being a Student Lab Technician in the Mu2e Experiment and also working with Researcher John Dombeck. At the beginning of Summer 2021, I joined the CDMS group under the guidance of Prof. Priscilla Cushman and Researcher Matthew Fritts and my research focus is on exploration into the building blocks of matter through complementary approaches. Looking forward to Summer 2022, some of the prospective research goals are to get a more in depth understand of the fridge, which is an essential component of the research, focus on the calibration of the NaI detector, new analyzing and data processing tasks for the upcoming run regarding estimation of energy and energy calibration with respect to the position, which involves also tasks on cleaning up the data before starting analyzing the actual data. We will also focus on balancing the channels which is related to the dPdI calculations and which means the relative calibration of multiple channels as each of them could have a different signal gain."
Cole Panzer
Cole is originally from Waupun, Wisconsin. "This award will help to finance tuition and relax the burden of student loans. Additionally, I will be able to focus more on my coursework and research without the added pressure of working a student job. I have not narrowed down a hyper-specific area of research. However, last summer (2021) I worked with Prof. Michael Coughlin on an algorithm to filter noise in raw gravitational-wave data from LIGO. This fall (2022), I will be working with Prof. Liliya Williams for my AST 4994W senior thesis. The project hasn't been nailed down yet, but Prof. Williams often works with dark matter and galaxy centers.
Steven Rieck
Evan Skinner
2021 Swanson Scholarship Recipients
Noelle Feist
Noelle is from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. "While it's a boring answer, I'll use the money to pay for rent and tuition so that I can really focus on my studies and looking for student groups and research positions instead of finding a job. I'm really interested in big, dense things in space, like black holes and neutron stars! Anything that breaks our current understanding of the universe is something that I want to explore. Currently I am doing research relating to gravitational waves, and it has been fantastic!"
Mason Hubert
Mason is from Fridley, Minnesota. His plans for the award are to use it to help pay for tuition or any other research opportunities that he could be fortunate enough to be involved with. Mason is focused primarily on astrophysics, but has many other interests in other areas of physics as well.
2020 Swanson Scholarship Recipients
Daniel Urbanski
Dan is from Little Falls, MN. He intends to use this award to pay for the GRE and graduate school applications. He enjoys learning about stellar evolution and particle acceleration in intense and turbulent environments. He is also interested in high energy and plasma physics.
Hannah Bjorklund
Hannah is from Minneapolis, MN. She is hoping to use this money to pay for a study abroad experience at the University of Oslo in 2021. There, she would study Astrophysics and Physics courses such as Stellar Atmospheres and Plasma Physics. Hannah is interested in many areas, but particularly quantum physics and cosmology.
Ramona White
Ramona is from Neenah, WI. She plans to use the scholarship towards tuition as she wraps up her final three semesters of undergraduate study. She is interested in finding creative ways to educate and share the wonder of modern astrophysics research with the public. Science communication is her focus for the future.
2019 Swanson Scholarship Recipients
Jordan Bartett
Jordan is from Richfield, MN. She plans to use the money to pay for tuition. She is interested in a broad range of astrophysics research.
