Gabe is a Winner!
What a week - sorry it has taken me so long to post!
Last weekend, after turning in my grades in record time, I headed off to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee for the DOE's Science and Energy Research Challenge* - a competition of undergraduate researchers.
Of about 500 projects funded by the DOE, almost 200 students applied for the competition. 85 were invited to compete, to present a poster and explain their research to a group of judges. Gabe took 1st place among all the physics entries! It was very awesome! His research was cool and interesting: determining the properties that dark matter would have to have in order to account for the "haze" seen at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. And he knew his stuff down cold.
Check out the giant check! First time I've seen one in person :)
I was very proud, though I'm not sure I can take much credit. I was not his research adviser, just his academic adviser. I did give him encouragement and letters of recommendation, but couldn't give him advice on dark matter - he now knows that way better than I do!
In any case, we will be bragging about this for some time to come! Yay, Gabe!
*Click on the image to the right of Gabe's name to see his poster (but not if you have a slow internet connection)
3 comments:
That is so cool! Congrats, Gabe!
You all should have told me you were going to Oak Ridge...that's right up the road from me, just a little over an hour.
Oh, drat - I should have! I was so frantically trying to get grades done before I left, I wasn't thinking about much else. We could've gone to the science museum together - that's what I did with my spare time, when I got there a couple hours early, but it's not as much fun alone.
Congratulations Gabe! This is a HUGE achievement!
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