“When I used to say I wanted to be a cosmologist, people would ask, ‘Oh, you want to go to beauty school?’” recalls Johanna Teske (BS physics ’08). These days, Teske’s impressive work in astrophysics makes it hard to mistake her aspirations.
Teske has always wanted to study the stars, but a string of prestigious undergraduate internships shifted her sights from the theoretical world of cosmology to the more observation-based field of astrophysics. During her sophomore year, she completed her first internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where she worked on modeling photon orbits around black holes. While there, Teske had the opportunity to attend seminars on a wide variety of astronomical topics, from missions to the outer solar system to exploding stars. “There were so many subdisciplines that my eyes were opened to,” she says. “It made me see what was out there.”
The following year, Teske interned at the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket, a small island 30 miles off the Massachusetts coast and home to America’s first female astronomer. It was an ideal place to observe the skies. “You walk out there and see the brilliant moon and vast expanse of stars and it is absolutely breathtaking,” she recalls. Through her research on the chemical elements in recently “deceased” stars, Teske gained “a better picture of what it meant to be a real astrophysicist.”
Last summer, Teske collected and analyzed data on galaxy interactions at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In January, she presented her independent research at the 211th annual American Astronomical Society Meeting in Austin, Texas.
Although she has nearly completed her undergraduate work, Teske continues to pursue learning experiences. She currently interns at the Carnegie Institute of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, where she is characterizing the composition of gas around young stars and searching for signatures of forming planets. Supported by grants from the physics and math departments, the honors program, and the CAS dean’s office, she plans to attend the International Astronomical Union’s symposium on organic matter in space at the University of Hong Kong in February.
Teske has also begun looking for a PhD program that is “as interdisciplinary as possible, with strong geology, chemistry, and geochemistry components.” She explains, “The field of astrophysics is at a point where these disciplines have to join forces to enable us to discover more and make conclusions about the history of the solar system, the characteristics of other solar systems, and the possibility of life on those other planets.”
students Students who study abroad with AU’s Beijing Enclave program aim to broaden their knowledge of Chinese language and culture. But before they depart, it’s natural that questions of a practical nature arise. “One student asked me if they could use credit cards in China—and I said, ‘Of course!’” says Chinese instructor Joyce Li. She adds with a laugh, “The student was very relieved.”
Li and her colleague Silvia Guo are at AU for the 2007–08 school year as part of the Beijing Visiting Instructor program. Conceived by Dean Kay Mussell in conversation with Enclave director Youli Sun on a bus in Beijing, the program began in fall 2006. It brings two Chinese instructors from the Beijing Enclave program to teach in AU’s Department of Language and Foreign Studies for a year. “Learning about contemporary Chinese culture makes the students more comfortable when they arrive in Beijing,” says Li.
The program also gives students instructional continuity from AU to Beijing and back. “One of the program’s goals is to fully integrate Chinese language instruction at both sites,” says Gail Riley, adjunct faculty coordinator and coordinator of the Chinese language program. “Prior to this, we were already using the same textbook and felt this was the next step in strengthening the Chinese language program.” The department currently offers a minor in Chinese.
Ethan Merritt, senior study abroad advisor in the AU
Abroad Office, adds, “It’s
probably one of the best examples on campus of integrating a study abroad
program into the AU curriculum—to have instructors that students have
gotten to know in Beijing come here to teach. Likewise, instructors that
students get to know here are in Beijing when [students] study there. It
provides very nice continuation in language instruction.”
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