Leadership Development Experience

Abstract

I spent this last summer working as a student researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Under the mentorship of Joseph Smidt, a staff scientist and deputy group leader at the lab, I helped develop a chemistry network that will eventually be used to test how important chemicals like water and methane formed in the early universe. While such work is relatively obscure to the general public, it could be potentially very important in the scientific community, particularly if predictions from our simulations agree with astronomical observations. Such work would help to validate our cosmological models in addition to teaching us much about how the building blocks of life were seeded in our own solar system.