Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)
UW Bothell Physics REU Program
The Physics REU program at the University of Washington Bothell hosts undergraduate research students for 8 weeks during the summer to participate in research projects, professional development activities, and an introduction to research-oriented careers in physics and astronomy. Participants will be matched with faculty mentors based on student interests and will join a cohort of students participating in weekly seminars, workshops, and an introduction to research resources and skills.
Research areas
- Climate and Atmospheric Science
- Computational Physics and Astrophysics
- Gravitational Wave Astronomy
2024 program calendar
- February 16: application deadline
- March 8: common acceptance deadline for NSF Physics and Astronomy REUs
- May 15: travel arrangements should be completed
- June 16: arrive at program site
- June 17: first day of program
- August 9: REU Symposium presentations from all students
- August 10: depart program
Please note: All Physics REU sites will utilize a common deadline of March 8, 2024, for students to accept or decline first-round offers at domestic (non-international) sites. Sites may send offers to students at any time before this, but students will not be required to decide before this common date. Because of necessary organizational lead time, international REU sites may require earlier acceptance dates.
Eligibility
- You must be an undergraduate student in any academic year (freshman through senior) at the time of the summer program.
- You don’t need to have a declared major, but you must have already completed the introductory physics sequence at your school.
- Participants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents in order to be supported by NSF funding.
How to apply
Your application is comprised of the following:
- A completed online application.
- A statement of interest, up to 1 page in length.
- In the statement of interest, describe your academic background, your interests, and your tentative career plans. The statement should indicate why you feel REU participation would benefit you and your future plans; also, describe how you believe you can contribute to your mentor’s research topic. If applicable, you are welcome to describe prior undergraduate research experience, as well as any other information that you feel may be useful to our assessment. Finally, please indicate if you have a preferred mentor or topic area. (Note, however, that final mentor assignment occurs after selection of participants.)
- Your current college transcript(s).
- Unofficial transcripts from your school registrar are acceptable. If your school provides you with online access to your transcript or degree audit, a PDF printout is acceptable.
- Contact information for 2 professors or research mentors who can supply letters of reference.
All application materials must be submitted online.
Stipends, lodging, and travel expenses
- You are paid a program stipend of $5,600.
- You will live in the new UW Bothell dorms and use the dining hall at no direct expense to you. Your roommates will be participants in the Physics REU at UW Bothell and other summer science programs.
- Up to $600 per student is available to assist with travel expenses to get to UW Bothell at the beginning of the program and to return to your home or school after the end of the program.
Local and regional resources
Questions?
For questions, please contact joeykey@uw.edu.
Research mentors and project descriptions
Dan Jaffe
Project: Partnering with communities to study indoor air quality
Our team of researchers has studied air quality in many environments and around the world. Typically, we haul fancy instruments to mountaintops or put them on aircraft (like in the picture). But in 2022, we are starting to examine air quality in the great indoors! Why would we do this? Well, we spend a lot of time indoors, and we are now finding that indoor air quality can actually be worse than outdoor air quality. We are also starting to use a suite of low-cost instruments. Why use low-cost sensors? Are we running out of money? No, but we want to find out what are the capabilities of these lower-cost sensors and how can we use them to help people improve their indoor air. We are particularly interested in facilitating the deployment of these low-cost sensors in disadvantaged communities that are near major sources, like freeway or heavy industry. Specifically, in summer of 2022, we have projects in collaboration with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and with Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. Students in our team need a background in physics, chemistry, and/or statistics and will learn new skills in environmental science and working with community groups.
Joey Shapiro Key
Project: Searching for Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals with the LISA Data Challenges
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission will detect low-frequency gravitational waves in the 2030s. Extreme Mass Ratio Inspiral (EMRI) systems produce gravitational waves during the long-lasting inspiral and plunge of stellar origin black holes into massive black holes in the centers of galaxies. The small black hole spends thousands of orbits in close vicinity of the massive black hole, allowing for ultra-precise measurements of the parameters of the binary system as the gravitational wave signal encodes information about the spacetime of the central massive object. EMRI waveforms are complex and the signals need to be coherently tracked for hundreds to thousands of cycles to produce a detection, making EMRI signals one of the most challenging data analysis problems in all of gravitational wave astronomy. To address these challenges this project will develop search techniques using the collection of harmonics for the system, filtering short segments of data against a comb of harmonics. The number of important harmonics depends on the source properties such as the eccentricity and black hole spin, and these properties can be exploited to identify EMRI signals in simulated data with the LISA Data Challenges.
Ansel Neunzert
Project: Narrow Spectral Artifact Identification for LIGO Continuous Wave Searches
Rapidly spinning neutron stars are expected to produce weak but continuous gravitational waves that will be detectable by LIGO searches in upcoming observing runs. However, searches for these signals are plagued by the presence of narrow spectral artifacts in the data—noise that originates on Earth, not in space. Students will develop and test data analysis tools to monitor and identify this type of noise, contributing to improved continuous wave data quality in the upcoming fourth LIGO observing run. A variety of projects are available based on student interest: refining automation of noise identification, tracking noise artifacts over time and across multiple streams of data, and investigating correlations between related noise artifacts. Students will write code in a collaborative research context, learn to use the LIGO Data Grid, and become familiar with data produced by the LIGO observatory sites. Students will also attend regular meetings of the LIGO continuous wave and detector characterization working groups to build their knowledge of gravitational wave search methods and astrophysical sources, and to understand how their work contributes to future prospects for the detection of continuous gravitational waves.
Eric Salathé
Project: Computational Modeling: Atmospheric Physics and Climate Change
The physical processes in the atmosphere that produce extreme events and that amplify the response to greenhouse gas forcing depend on basic physics concepts such as the movement of latent, sensible, and radiant energy between components of the Earth system. The role of processes in determining global- scale temperature and precipitation patterns is well-understood and underlie the projections of global climate change. There has been limited capacity, however, to model and study these processes in extreme events such as floods, droughts, and heat waves, which depend on small spatial and temporal scales. As a result, the most important effects of climate change on human and natural systems are poorly understood. This project will be based on the analysis of recent high-resolution climate model simulations for the Pacific Northwest and Eastern China. These simulations are ongoing using high-performance computing facilities in the U.S. and China. Existing simulation results provide an exceptional resource for original student research using a range of computational and theoretical methods. Students may also participate in developing new simulations working with climate models in a high-performance computing environment. Research in this area at UW Bothell is currently supported through a subaward from Tsinghua University and collaborations with researchers at UW Seattle.
Physics REU cohorts
Funded by National Science Foundation Award #2050928.