Box 19162
Arlington, TX 76019-0162
Physics Senior Honored
Senior physics major Kara Stogsdill earned a prestigious national award for her research studying ways to measure the mass of tiny particles called neutrinos.
The Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award is presented by the Society of Physics Students—an organization of the American Institute of Physics—to students for their exceptional research achievements in any physics-related field.
Stogsdill’s research is part of the Project 8 Neutrino Mass Experiment, which includes faculty and students from UTA and 13 other universities and national laboratories in the United States and Europe. Project 8’s goal is to measure the mass of the neutrino, one of the building blocks of the universe. Stogsdill is building a Zeeman slower, an instrument that is used to slow and cool a beam of hot atoms so that scientists can study them more easily.
“Kara is an outstanding researcher who has made major contributions to UTA’s work for Project 8,” says Ben Jones, associate professor of physics and Stogsdill’s faculty mentor. “She has played a central role on our team, working with UTA scientists, undergraduates, and graduate students to realize a new method of cooling large fluxes of atoms to millikelvin temperatures.”
Stogsdill originally came to UTA with a plan to major in engineering.
“It wasn’t until I started talking to my physics professor that I realized that being a physicist was a very realistic career goal,” she says. “I asked him questions after class every day. Eventually he asked if I would like to see a lab and introduced me to Dr. Jones. After that, I was hooked.”