Include a publication or give a presentation on the research conducted. Reflect on that experience. What did you learn from this experience? How will the skills you learned as an undergraduate researcher advance your future career?
Mand_Poster_e4nu-1I presented this poster at the Virginia Space Grant Consortium’s Undergraduate Research Conference in April of 2023. This was a unique opportunity to connect with NASA professionals and other undergraduates performing research under the VSGC Research Scholarship. I was able to learn about other fields of research relating to NASA’s goals. One project focused on the application of “smart clothing” in order to monitor vital signs in a non-intrusive manner. At this conference, I also learned how to present research in a concise and clear format. Finally, I had the opportunity to network with professionals and even meet my future roommate for grad school! We will both be attending the same graduate school in the fall for Physics and Physical Chemistry.
Describe how your research is significant. How are your research questions and/or findings relevant to stakeholders at the local, state, national, or global levels? What are the practical and theoretical contributions of your research?
The accompanying image is a photo of me presenting my research at the Division of Nuclear Physics Fall Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana in October of 2022. The research I am performing is to test and improve energy reconstruction methods for leptons – specifically neutrinos. This research will be used for event generators such as GENIE to improve neutrino detections to reach the precision required for next-generation neutrino experiments such as DUNE and T2K. This is important on a global scale because it will improve our understanding of the standard model. Neutrino oscillations are one of the few phenomena in physics that are not described by the standard model, therefor this research will help to improve our understanding of physics as a whole.