In the presence of water, dissolved surfactants will spontaneously align with each other to form a barrier surface between water and a non-polar solvent like hexane similar to a bubble blown from a wand. Throughout my undergraduate degree, I used dynamic light scattering and fluorescence spectroscopy to study a promising set of surfactants that produced interesting results when the size and shape was investigated and the mixture proved inconsistent with standard reverse micelle characteristics. This phenomenon can be used to create nanoscale laboratories for studying novel physical phenomenon and producing nanomaterials. The resulting paper was submitted for publication in December 2023.

Opaline silicates are differentiated by the way water is integrated within the crystal. The characteristics of the opaline silicate distribution on Mars contains valuable information for understanding the history of water on Mars and subsequently its climate history.  Studies were completed previously showing that it is possible to detect these silicates using satellite images when they are captured with the targeting mode of CRISM, a source of data which requires a significant amount of time and resources to analyze. This project was an effort to show that it is possible to detect this type of mineral with the more widely accessible mapping mode which also provides valuable information about mineral distribution in modern day. 

Galaxies with a supermassive black hole in the center sometimes emit high intensity jets of radio waves from the center. The activity from these galaxies has been shown to behave abnormally when viewed in the visible wavelengths. Though variability is seen in galaxies, this phenomenon is also observed when there is no evidence for processes occurring within the galaxy to account for the radio jets. Here, we selected a radio active galaxy that was easily visible given the nearby light pollution and had one published data set in existence. Observations were completed over the course of several months in order to validate previous measurements and provide initial observation of this galaxy to establish the possibility of variability at a later date. 

When collecting data on another planet, the options are to collect data at ground level or with a satellite. This creates massive difficulties in analysis of the Martian surface which is often obscured by clouds. In this research I used the IDL programming language to explore an alternative method of analysis that finds the result based only on the image data and a geometric space created from known spectral data of minerals existing on Mars. This method showed promising results for establishing a view of the Martian surface starting with known minerals as compared to extracting mineral information directly from the images.