Astronomy

When I was a little girl, I liked reading. A lot. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. Soon there came a moment when I had read not just all of my schoolbooks, but also almost all the books my parents owned. So when I was eight or nine years old, around 1989 or 1990, my parents presented me with a gift -- an encyclopedia, all to myself. This particular encyclopedia was the "Enciclopedia de las Ciencias" (translation: "Encyclopedia of the Sciences"), and it was a set of ten green hardcover books, with each book covering a different subject. It was a gift that I absolutely adored, and I quickly set out to read all ten volumes. In order, of course.

The first book of the encyclopedia was titled "Astronomía y Ciencia Espacial" (translation: "Astronomy and Space Science"). I think this was the very first astronomy book I ever read, and it was enough to get me hooked. When I was done reading it I moved on to read the rest of the books in the encyclopedia, but I always kept coming back to that first book. I read it and re-read it and re-re-read it countless times. The book is almost 25 years old by now, and I still have it! That's the book, in the picture here to the right. The pages are yellow and the cover is all worn and beat up and starting to tear in places, but this is a book that I'll keep forever. It introduced me to a whole field of study, metaphorically giving me a taste of the universe. This book led me to seek out more astronomy books. It led me to beg my parents for a telescope (which I eventually got, like five or six years later). It led me to always answering the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with "An astronomer!". And in due time, it led me to get an undergraduate degree in Physics and a graduate degree in Astronomy.

I've worked on astronomy research at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The pages listed below cover the details of the three astronomy research projects I've worked on, in reverse chronological order.

• Black Hole Mergers as Probes of Structure Formation, my graduate-level astrophysics research, carried out at Penn State and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, between 2004 and 2011.
• Search for Pulsations in Metal-Deficient Field Giants, an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) that I participated in during the summer of 2002, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
• Investigations of Single Pulses from Radio Pulsars, a project I worked on as Undergraduate Research Assistant, from just before the start of the Spring 2001 semester to the end of the Fall 2002 semester, during my studies at UPR Mayagüez.