Hi everyone! I'm so excited to have you following along with my journey in France! Along the way, I hope I'll be able to show you a bit of what French culture is like, and maybe get you excited about science along the way.
A little bit about me: I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and spent lots of time growing up in the snow and the great outdoors. For pretty much my whole life, I've loved being active and being out in nature, and I remember falling in love with the night sky at a very young age. When I was ten years old, my family and I moved to Washington, DC, and I did the rest of my growing up there until heading to college. Washington is a big city with lots of people from all over the world, and I feel very lucky to have grown up in two such different and interesting places. In high school, I studied lots of math, chemistry, and physics, and I loved it all! I never stopped being fascinated with the stars and the universe, and after getting to watch a solar eclipse in 2017, I realized I was pretty sure the coolest job in the world would be studying the cosmos.
After graduating from high school, I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to study astrophysics at Carnegie Mellon University. I spent four years taking lots of fascinating physics and math classes, and in the summers I worked as a student researcher. I loved my research jobs and got to spend the summer before my final year of college studying some of the strangest objects in our universe: black holes.
Before my last year of college, I learned about the Fulbright program, which awards students and researchers money to travel abroad to study or do research. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I applied for a Fulbright grant to study for my Master's in physics at the Université Paris-Saclay in France. Four days before graduating from Carnegie Mellon, I learned that I had been accepted and received the grant!
This year, I'm living just south of Paris in a town called Courcelle-sur-Yvette. Every day I take the train to the Université Paris-Saclay campus in Orsay, the next town over. In my free time, I'm exploring Paris, spending lots of time running & hiking in my local parks, and eating pastries & bread at my local café. Starting this spring, I'll work as a research intern at the Institut de Physique Théorique (Institute for Theoretical Physics), where I'll be exploring new ways to think about gravity and black holes!
Want to learn how you could be a Fulbright Scholar like me? The Fulbright Program is the United States government's flagship international exchange program. Fulbrighters foster mutual understanding between the United States and partner nations, share knowledge across communities, and improve lives around the world. Learn more by clicking here!
