Student Research Group

Summer Research 2008

I am working with two students this summer, Emma Wollman and Erin Martel - both of whom are seniors. Both are working on X-ray emission from O star winds. To get a sense of other student projects that my student-based research group will be working on in the future (and have in the past), you can check out this brief presentation about potential student projects I gave in the early spring of 2008.

Personnel

Emma Wollman ('09) studies Greek, and is modeling the resolved X-ray line profiles in the Chandra spectra of several massive stars. Erin Martel ('09) studies Latin, and is analyzing the morphological trends in the Chandra spectra of over a dozen massive stars.

Mike Rosenberg ('08) graduated this past spring, and is going to MIT in the fall, to continue his studies 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, Mike presented some preliminary results of his thesis research at the Swarthmore student research poster session, sponsored by Sigma Xi [ppt, png, pdf].

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, doing research for the National Academy of Sciences, programming computer games, 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:

Vernon Chaplin ('07), "High Time Resolution Spectroscopic Measurements of Electron Temperature in the SSX Plasma" [jpg poster or pdf thesis]
Nate Shupe ('05), "Modeling Studies of Photoionization Experiments Driven by Z-pinch X-rays" [pdf]
Genevieve de Messieres ('04), "XMM-Newton X-ray Spectroscopy of the B2 Bright Giant ε Canis Majoris" [pdf]
Roban Kramer ('03), "Modelling O-Star X-Ray Emission Line Profiles" [pdf]
Stephanie Tonnesen ('03), "X-Ray Emission Line Profiles from the Magnetically Confined Wind Shock Model" [pdf]
Joanna Brown ('02), "Modelling Density Enhanced Shells in the Circumstellar Envelope of the Carbon-Rich AGB Star IRC+10216"

Various other students (Allison Adelman, Kate Baker, 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.