Soumi De, a graduate student and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physics, has been awarded a prestigious Director's Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory to conduct postdoctoral research. The highly competitive fellowship was awarded to De based on academic and research accomplishments, the strength of her proposed research, as well as her potential impact at the laboratory. De’s research at Syracuse is supported by the Kathy ’73 and Stan ’72 Walters Endowed Fund for Science Research and a Research Excellence Doctoral Funding Fellowship.

As a member of the Syracuse University Gravitational Wave Group, De uses observations from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and computer simulations to study neutron stars and black holes. According to De, these astrophysical objects often exist in pairs (or binaries) orbiting around each other. Their collisions create ripples in the fabric of space time called gravitational waves. De’s research is answering questions including: how matter behaves at extremely high densities, how systems of black holes and neutron stars form, and where heavy elements like gold and platinum came from.

At Los Alamos National Lab, De will work with the Computational Physics and Applied Computer Science Group on multidisciplinary scientific research. She will begin her fellowship in the fall following her doctoral thesis defense in June.