“My internship has given me experiences that have not only stimulated my imagination but will also benefit me in my future academic and professional careers.”
— Alexander Brown
Summer work conducted by physics professor James Lombardi Jr. and his student research assistant, Alexander Brown, was featured in the episode “The Life and Death of Stars,” a segment of the History Channel series “The Universe.”
Lombardi and Brown performed computer simulations and created visualizations of a stellar collision that help establish how stars called “blue stragglers” can be formed through the collision of “garden-variety” stars. (To view the visualizations, please visit this page.)
“Alex accomplished a tremendous amount during his internship,” says Lombardi. “Our interactions this summer quickly developed from that of a student and teacher to that of two colleagues. Alex completed not only the collision and visualization for the History Channel but also has initiated a series of new state-of-the-art calculations modeling collisions of more massive stars.”
Brown is a physics major and a history minor. “My internship has given me experiences that have not only stimulated my imagination but will also benefit me in my future academic and professional careers,” he says. “I’ve learned things this summer that can only be taught outside of the classroom.”