Alex Ross
I am a junior studying physics and astronomy with minors in applied mathematics and aeronautics and astronautics. My research is in multi-messenger astrophysics, which is a relatively new subfield of physics that combines gravitational and electromagnetic wave observations with neutrino and cosmic ray emissions to study extreme astrophysical objects and events. My research journey began and continues with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) LEGGOS research group led by Dr. Gourav Khullar. In this group, I have had the chance to work with JWST data to study high-redshift lensed galaxies while creating my own machine learning algorithm to build pseudo-spectral energy distributions from photometric data. I have also collaborated with NASA scientists and researchers from other universities on projects and papers in this group. I then joined the Institute for Nuclear Theory for a research project with Dr. Tianqi Zhao and Professor Sanjay Reddy, focusing on using machine learning to simulate and constrain the neutron star equation of state, a project which I am still working on with the first paper being submitted for publication soon. I also did a summer internship at the NASA Goddard Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory with Dr. Eleonora Castelli and Dr. John Baker, where I developed my own software to rapidly analyze data from the upcoming LISA space-based gravitational wave observatory. This project is also ongoing with the code currently living in the official NASA mission repository for LISA. When not studying the universe, I am a lead for the Husky Robotics Instrumentation team, a member of the Husky Satellite Lab propulsion team, and the treasurer for the UW chapter of Triangle fraternity. I also enjoy card games, lifting big weights, sailing, mountaineering, getting sendy, golfing, and playing the silliest possible instruments (trombone and banjo). I applied for the Goldwater scholarship to reflect on my academic journey, and the funding will help pay publication fees for my first-author research papers. The Goldwater scholarship will allow me to disseminate my research to the broader scientific community, whether by helping with these fees or allowing me to travel to conferences to present my work.
Goals
I intend to pursue a Ph.D. in physics, focusing on multi-messenger astrophysics. In particular, I hope to help build the next generation of computational tools for processing and interpreting gravitational wave signals in order to constrain the properties of compact astrophysical objects such as neutron stars.
Tips
Find and lean into the common thread that ties together your experiences. This could be a uniting subject in your research, an underlying motivation that brought you to this point in your life, or something else. Your application should read like a story, and every good story has one main narrative arc that brings together seemingly disparate events.
