Can you tell me a little about yourself?
My name is Isabella Cox and I am going into my senior year as a physics major and astronomy minor at RIT. I am also from Rochester, NY, where I go to college. I have a service dog who I named Hubble after the Hubble Space Telescope, but, don’t worry, I won’t be renaming him James Webb once that launches. I like to read biographies of twentieth century astronomers; some of my favorites include Edwin Hubble (obviously) and Makio Akiyama.
How did you get interested in astronomy?
When I was 5 years old, I would watch Nova on PBS with my parents where I saw an episode about astrophysics. I told my parents then that I would be an astrophysicist some day. I performed astronomy research at RIT throughout both middle school and high school, so it has been almost a decade since my first research experience. I shadowed an astronomer at RIT when I was 12 years old and she had prepared a bunch of computer games to keep me occupied, but I showed up with a bunch of highlighted questions about a research paper she had written and we ended up discussing that for my entire visit. She invited me back later to work with her. My parents have always been very supportive, exposing my sister and I to the academic life starting at a very young age.
What motivated you to apply to an international REU?
I was really interested in getting experience at a different university, because so far I have only had a chance to perform research locally at RIT.
Can you tell me about your summer research project?
I’m working with Drs. Kristian Finlator, Nina Bonaventura, and Kate Whitaker using different hydrodynamic cosmological simulations to help inform our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve, especially at high redshifts before the actual observations come from the James Webb Space Telescope. We are looking at how galaxies grow in three different simulations to test if star formation is occurring in equilibrium and to understand the flow of baryonic matter cycling in and out of galaxies.
What skills and knowledge would you like to acquire this summer?
I would like to improve my ability to program more efficiently with big catalogs, instead of relying on running things overnight; it would be good to learn how to optimize my programs.
If you could have any superpower what would it be?
I would say the power to pause time. I feel like I always need more time in the day to work on my projects. When I’m debugging I wish that I could pause time because I get fixated on a tiny error and then I lose the rest of my day.