Student Research Group
Summer Research 2009I am working with James MacArthur this summer. James is a physics major and will be a junior in the fall. We'll be working - along with Marc Gagne at West Chester - on trying to understand the strong X-ray emission from a pair of binary stars in M17. To get a sense of other student projects that my student-based research group will be working on in the future, you can check out this brief presentation about potential projects I gave in February 2009. The project about the unusual young binary stars in M17 is described in the Chandra observing proposal. The project on the laboratory astrophysics experiments and modeling is described in the poster by my old student, Michael Rosenberg, who did some preliminary work on the project two summers ago. New: Vernon Chaplin ('07) has published a paper: "Spectroscopic Measurements of Temperature and Plasma Impurity Concentration During Magnetic Reconnection at the Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment," in Physics of Plasmas that was based on his senior thesis at Swarthmore. Congratulations, Vernon! 
Erin Martell and Emma Wollman presented a poster about their stellar wind research at the Atomic Processes in Plasmas meeting in Monterey, California in March 2009. They won the prize for the best student poster at the meeting. 
PersonnelEmma Wollman ('09) studies Greek, and is modeling the resolved X-ray line profiles in the Chandra spectra of several massive stars. Erin Martell ('09) studies Latin, and is analyzing the morphological trends in the Chandra spectra of over a dozen massive stars. Emma gave a presentation at the 19th Annual Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium Student Research Symposium, at Wesleyan University on November 8, 2008, titled, "Spectral Modeling of X-rays from Hot Star Winds." You can look at her talk and read her paper. Update: Emma and Erin have graduated. The both received High Honors in their external honor examinations. Emma won the Department's Elmore Prize as well as the College's Lang Award. Erin won the Department's Berman Prize. Emma will be attending Caltech's physics program in the fall (working with Keith Schwab's research group) and Erin will be attending the University of Chicago's astronomy program. Mike Rosenberg ('08) graduated last spring, and has started in the Physics PhD program at MIT, continuing his study of plasma physics. His research project involved modeling the x-ray photoionization of plasma at the Z-Machine, with applications to astrophysics. This was the basis of Mike's senior honors thesis. In September 2007, Mike presented some preliminary results of his thesis research at the Swarthmore student research poster session, sponsored by Sigma Xi [ppt, png, pdf]. Other recent graduates include: Vernon Chaplin ('07), Mike Kuhn ('07), Steve St. Vincent ('07), Victoria Swisher ('06), Micah Walter-Range ('06), Kevin Grizzard (St. John's College, '06), Nate Shupe ('05), and Casey Reed ('05). These people are doing things like working in Vietnam, working on science policy at the National Academy of Sciences, going to law school, going to graduate school in international relations or astrophysics, being a science librarian at a small liberal arts college. Students who wrote honors theses under David's direction include:
Various other students (Allison Adelman, Carie Cardamone, Dave Conners, Mark Janoff, Eric Levy, Marty Mudd, Kate Penrose, Elliot Reed, and Rachel Sapiro) and Lecturer Prue Schran, have worked on research projects with us over the past seven years. Some of our work is supported through Prism Computational Sciences, in Madison, Wisconsin. Prism is a small company that does basic and applied physics research and code development. It is run by Dr. Joe MacFarlane, who is a long-time collaborator of ours. Mike Rosenberg used the VisRad view-factor code, from Prism Computational Sciences, to make an animation of the imploding Z-pinch wire array at the Z-Machine facility at Sandia, as part of his senior thesis work. The students also work closely with Stan Owocki at the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, and Marc Gagne and his group at West Chester University. You can also access information about older students and their presentations. |
Student Travel and Research Funding
HHMI travel funding
Information for students
Choosing a graduate program: a collection of web resources both general (i.e. not astro/physics specific) and specific.
Graphics
Historical graphics
Links
Our research group's presentations page
ADS
Chandra X-ray Center
physical and astronomical constants
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David Cohen: cohen -at- astro -dot- swarthmore -dot- edu
Last modified: July 31, 2009