Two Follette Lab members win prestigious awards. Congrats Cailin and Sierra!
Follette Lab senior Sierra Gomez is awarded the Five Colleges, Inc. Lorna Peterson Prize
Sierra Gomez, an undergraduate senior at UMass Amherst, was the 2022 recipient of the Five Colleges Lorna M. Peterson Prize. The prize, which is described by the Consortium as “...support[ing] scholarly and creative work by undergraduate students taking part in a Five College program,” is awarded to a nominee who exemplifies collaboration in their academic career. Congratulations Sierra!
Follette Lab Junior Cailin Plunkett wins Goldwater Fellowship
Cailin Plunkett, a junior physics and math major at Amherst College, was one of the 417 students nationwide to receive the Goldwater Scholarship. When she was interviewed for an Amherst news article about this year’s scholarship winners, she discussed both her work here in the Follette Lab and her time researching at LIGO in the summer of 2021. In our lab, her work focused on understanding the formation mechanisms of planets and how these differ from those of stars. Her time at LIGO was spent working with noise models that would enable the isolation of gravitational wave signals from black holes. Congratulations Cailin!
“I loved the analytical dance to corroborate—or rule out—formation theories, which required interaction between astrophysics, statistics, engineering and computer science”