My experience as a member of the Kansas State University (KSU) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) during the summer of 2011 involved working with the High Energy Physics (HEP) group of the KSU Physics Department.  I conducted this research with another member of the REU, Julian Starr, and we were advised by Dr. Glenn Horton-Smith and Dr. Tim Bolton.  A KSUHEP Post-Doc, David McKee, was also instrumental to our research by providing excellent day-to-day guidance to help us towards our ultimate goal.

Aside from research, a special thanks goes to Kristan Corwin and Larry Weaver for organizing fun REU activities throughout the course of the summer including: Dr. Weaver's lecture series on topics in physics, tours of the KSU Physics labs, the canoe trip, picnics, and other events.  Additionally, thanks to Dr. Bruce Glymour and Dr. Amy Lara for conducting the eight week Ethics course.

The project I worked on throughout the summer of 2011 involved using LArSoft, which is a software environment being developed through Fermilab to simulate Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) experiments involving neutrino detectors.  LArSoft is capable of simulating events for three Fermilab-based experiments: ArgoNeuT, MicroBooNE, and LBNE.  The summer research goal for my project was to implement a magnetic field to the simulations.  This implementation was successful, but introduced curvature to the tracks of charged particles that required additional modifications to existing track-finding components so that tracks could be fitted to particles in simulated data.

You can view our final presentation here.

This research project was made possible by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grant number PHY-0851599.

I am a rising senior at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota.  I'm double majoring in Physics and Mathematics.  I intend to attend graduate school for Physics and currently am interested in pursuing a professorial position after receiving my Ph.D.