Example undergraduate summer research projects that were underway in Summer 2025:
William Zhang and Vanisha Kheterpal, both rising sophomores, worked with Nadia Zakamska’s group on the analysis of radio emission from radio-quiet quasars. The majority of quasars — accreting supermassive black holes in other galaxies — have fairly weak radio emission but they are not radio-silent, and the origin of their radio emission remains a major astrophysical puzzle. William and Vanisha mastered highly technical tools for filtering out noisy or contaminated radio data and learned how to make images from interferometric data. They have discovered that some objects show clear substructure in their emission when observed at high enough spatial resolution. The morphology of this emission will offer clues to its origin.
Example radio morphologies of the radio emission of quasars. Images are produced by William Zhang and Vanisha Kheterpal from the radio data obtained in the high-resolution mode of the Jansky Very Large Array, they are 10-15 arcseconds on the side, with the white ellipse illustrating the typical size of a resolution element.
Rising JHU senior undergraduate Ryan Freund worked with Davis Fellow Daniel Thorngren on the evolution of short-period Saturn-mass planets as a result of extreme ultraviolet-driven mass loss. They have an article in prep on the project that will likely eventually be submitted for publication in the AAS Journals.
Naina Gupta, a rising senior JHU undergraduate, worked with Prof. Marriage on detector data analysis and also on analysis of how current datasets available to clean Galactic emission from CMB data contribute to error on the reionization optical depth.
Tanvi Ranade, also a rising senior JHU undergraduate, worked with Prof. Marriage on a web interface for the department’s small radio telescope to enable easier access for high school teachers and classes.