I’m going to be traveling quite a bit this summer, so I thought I’d briefly detail where I’ll be off to and what I’ll be doing.

From June 15th – 20th I’ll be attending the 255th IAU Symposium on low-metallicity galaxies in Rapallo, Italy. I’ll be presenting a contributed talk on Thursday on “Modeling the ISM Properties of Metal-Poor Galaxies and Gamma-Ray Bursts”. It’s looking like a really fascinating meeting, so it should be a great week!

Following the meeting, on June 23rd – 25th I’ll be visiting Geneva Observatory, working on some really interesting collaborations with Drs. Andre Maeder and Georges Meynet and presenting a seminar on June 25th (again on our modeling of metal-poor galaxies and gamma-ray bursts!)

Finally, I’ll be at Oxford University from July 6th – 26th (traveling there via Garmisch, Munich, Salzburg, Berlin, and Amsterdam on an extremely overclocked 10 days of vacation). While there I’ll be working with Dr. Katherine Blundell on developing a lab exercise in spectroscopy to be used as part of the HI-STAR (Hawaii Student/Teacher Astronomy Research) program at the UH Manoa campus, a summer astronomy research experience for high school students. The program encourages students to continue their research projects as participants in the Hawaii State Science and Engineering Fair (HSSEF). As someone who participated in science fair projects straight through middle school and high school, I’m pretty excited to get involved in this kind of program!

It’s going to be a pretty wild summer! And I’ll have more news up soon regarding my plans for the upcoming academic year!

I got more exciting news this weekend, during the Institute for Astronomy’s excellent Open House event on April 27th. I learned that I received the University Research Council Student Award for excellence in masters’-level research! It was a really nice surprise at the event, and I’m very grateful to the University of Hawaii’s Research Council for the recognition! Wow, it’s been a month of good news!

Today I found that I’ve been awarded the three-year Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship! This is a really great honor and opportunity – I’m very excited!! The Ford Foundation is a really fantastic organization – you can read more about them and their excellent work here, and about the details of the fellowship program here.

Well, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program has updated their website with a list of award and honorable mention winners, so I just found out that I received an honorable mention this year! Congrats to the other honorable mention winners, and a BIG congratulations to all the fellowship recipients this year!

Today I successfully passed my comprehensive exam, in which I presented my Ph.D. thesis topic to the entire IfA and then answered questions from them and from my thesis committee. I got some excellent questions and had a really positive discussion with my committee. I am officially ABD, and my thesis topic, “Exploring the Environments of Long-Duration Gamma-Ray Bursts”, is now approved! Hooray!