Four Astronomy Students Awarded or Honorably Mentioned with NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

The NSF received nearly 14,000 applications for this year's Graduate Research Fellowship Program. The GRFP is one of the nation's largest fellowship programs for students beginning their graduate studies. The NSF provides three years of financial support, spread over a maximum of five years, to 2,500 graduate students who have demonstrated significant potential to contribute to scientific innovation. An additional 1,140 students received honorable mentions this year.  

Out of 14,000 hopeful applicants, four of the most compelling project proposals came from Dartmouth's astronomy students. The NSF GRFP was awarded to undergrad Annabelle Niblett '26 and graduate Benjamin Velguth. Grads Cassidy Metzger and Artemis Theodoridis received honorable mentions. Fourteen Dartmouth students received GRFP awards this year, and five more were honorable mentions across all schools within the college. The Dartmouth astronomy program is very well represented. 

For her project, Annabelle Niblett worked with her professor, Elisabeth Newton, to propose observing and characterizing four young exoplanets with ground-based optical transmission spectroscopy. "Young exoplanets are an emerging field, and none have yet been observed in this way, which gave me a compelling argument for the novelty of this research" Niblett explains.

Niblett is starting her PhD this fall at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory under Professor Sukrit Ranjan. There, she will ultimately be focusing on nitrogen cycling on Mars and exoplanetary theory. "More than anything else, I think this grant gives me the flexibility to pursue my own research passions, engage in broad collaborations, and take opportunities as they arise," Niblett says. 

Benjamin Velguth plans to use machine learning algorithms to assemble the merger histories of nearby dwarf galaxies. "We are excited to work with all this brand-new data from Rubin Observatory's upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time", Velguth says "historically, dwarf galaxies have been difficult to study - but they have so much to tell us about the Universe".  

Working with his advisor, Professor Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil, Velguth hopes to discover which features of dwarf galaxies can tell researchers things like the number and size of previous galaxies that have merged into the existing one. 

Cassidy Metzger studies the powerful outflow of matter from supermassive black holes. These jets of matter drive massive cycles of heating and cooling that extend many times the length of the galaxy surrounding the black hole, and play a significant role in that galaxy's evolution. 

"By looking at jetted galaxies as early as 942 million years after the Big Bang, I seek to characterize how these jets have shaped the galaxies we see today. With a better understanding of the influence these jets have on galaxies over cosmic time, we can better understand our Galaxy and our place in it."

Artemis Theodoridis investigates relatively young stars that have chemical signatures typically reserved for much older stellar populations. "My research will be to create hundreds of stellar models for red giant branch (RGB) stars, including binary systems, to gauge whether this discrepancy is a result of underlying stellar physics or is a result of binary stellar systems that were mis-characterized as a singular source." Theodoridis explains. 

Much of the department's research focuses on building digital infrastructure for a new era of astronomy data. Upcoming surveys from new telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory are expected to produce massive amounts of novel data - moving catalogs up from terabytes to petabytes in size. 

Researchers are developing software, often incorporating machine learning and AI, to be able to parse through more data than ever before. No matter the way these new datasets are ultimately used, like building new catalogs or models, Dartmouth astronomy students are helping to define the frontier of their field and gaining recognition for their work.