This fellowship honors the teaching and research career of Robert O. Pepin, a long time faculty member of the School of Physics and Astronomy and a member of the Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics.
Samya Roychowdhury: "I am originally from India. I am primarily interested in Particle Physics Phenomenology and Cosmology. My current research is focused on the phenomenology of dark matter (DM) in extreme astrophysical environments, specifically in neutron stars."
2025 Pepin Fellowship Recipients
Sanket Chirame: "My research focuses on areas at the interface of condensed matter theory and the field of quantum information. I am exploring the dynamical features of open quantum systems and novel methods for stabilizing topological phases in these systems."
Nitzan Hirschberg
Ishmam Mahbub: ""My research interests focus on quantum field theory, scattering amplitudes, and collider phenomenology. I am currently investigating amplitudes involving higher-spin massive particles and exploring their connections to both particle physics and classical aspects of gravity."
Andrew Toivonen: "My research focuses on the search for multi-messenger observations of a neutron star merger and accompanying electromagnetic counterpart, called a kilonova."
2024 Pepin Fellowship Recipients
Derek Perera: "My research focuses on developing non-parametric models of cluster scale gravitational lenses. From these models, we attempt to constrain pc-kpc scale mass substructures in various ways, such as using time delays, high redshift stellar transients, and lensing degeneracies. The other direction of my research involves using these models to constrain the physical properties of dark matter particles."
Hayley Williams: "My research is focused on observations of high-redshift galaxies that are magnified by cluster-scale gravitational lensing."
2023 Pepin Fellowship Recipient
Alexander Criswell Alexander is from Mahtomedi, Minnesota. "My area of research is gravitational-wave and multimessenger astronomy. I focus on two areas within that field: 1) using gravitational waves from binary neutron star post-merger remnants to understand neutron star composition, and 2) developing data analysis infrastructure for the future space-borne gravitational-wave detector LISA with a specific interest in characterizing "choirs" of combined, individually-faint gravitational-wave signals to study the Milky Way and the early Universe."
Yang Yang Yang is from Chongqing, China. "My research interest is in condensed matter theory, particularly in frustrated magnetism originated from strongly correlated systems. I study both purely theoretical models and real materials synthesized in the laboratory."
2022 Pepin Fellowship Recipient
Jacob Ritz
Jacob is from Bethesda, Maryland. "I plan to use the money to support my summer research into the photo-physics of certain dyes and the development of a new super resolution microscopy technique. My research focuses on developing techniques to visualize and study molecular interactions in live cells."
Foster Thompson
Foster is from Louis, MO. He did my undergrad at Case Western in Cleveland OH. "The fellowship allows me to focus on research full-time during the summer as opposed to having to worry about some form of TA work on top of research. Like all grad students, what the school provides is my only source of income, so I have nothing special planned beyond continuing to afford to live. My current research is on non-equilibrium quantum mechanics/QFT."
2021 Pepin Fellowship Recipient
Hsiu-Chung Yeh
Hsiu-Chung is from Taiwan. He plans to use the money to support his current research on quantum computation. His research focuses on integrable systems and large deviation statistics. Recently, he started to work on quantum computation.
Qianyi Sheng Qianyi is from China. The fellowship will be used to support his summer research in prebiotic evolution study. He is working on the study of non-linear dynamics of complex chemical reaction networks, specifically, models of prebiotic evolution.
2020 Pepin Fellowship Recipient
Santosh Adhikari
Santosh is from Kathmandu, Nepal. He plans to use the award to fund summer research to investigate how cells regulate the use of internally stored fat based on metabolic needs using super-resolution microscopy. He is focused on developing and applying single molecule imaging techniques to study biophysical processes.
2019 Pepin Fellowship Recipient
Chris Nolting
Chris' research is in computational astrophysics, specifically modeling the interactions of AGN jets with the intracluster medium as a diagnostic measure to probe the dynamics of the ICM.
