Recent Undergraduate Awards for Blazar Research

Congratulations to Tara Sweeney (’19) and Zion Slaughter (’22) for winning undergraduate awards for blazar research with Professor Jedidah Isler during Summer 2019.

Tara Sweeney won a UGAR Leave Term Grant for 2019X for her project entitled, “A Statistical Analysis of the Optical Polarization in Blazars.” She is building her own analysis pipeline to better understand the long-term variability in optical polarization of blazars and how it relates to source brightness.  

Zion Slaughter has been selected as a 2019 E.E. Just summer research intern for his project entitled, “Characterizing the Broadband Variability of a Population of Blazars Found with the Gaia Telescope.” He will characterize the multiwavelength variability properties of this uniquely identified population of blazars and compare them to known blazar relationships to determine if they are a new subpopulation of blazars.