Charlotte Christensen Receives $484,300 Physics Research Grant

Charlotte Christensen, assistant professor of physics, recently received a $484,300 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant will support her study of what spurs and halts the growth of dwarf galaxies.

CAREER Awards are the most prestigious and competitive grants the NSF awards. They are made to junior faculty members who are exemplary scholars and teachers to enable them to pursue projects involving research and teaching.

Exploring How Galaxies Form

Beginning June 1, Christensen’s CAREER grant will support her research into how galaxies form.

Astronomers have found that galaxies grow through a balance of gas loss, gas in-fall, and star formation. What drives these processes, however, is only poorly understood.

To enhance that understanding, Christensen will model dwarf galaxies, which are ideal test subjects for studying galaxy growth because they have low masses and are especially sensitive to energy input from supernovae. Using extremely high-resolution, realistic computer simulations, she will map the flow of gas to identify what spurs and halts growth of dwarf galaxies.

Christensen also will compare the properties of dwarf galaxies at different distances from more massive galaxies. Finally, she will examine the gas transferred from dwarf galaxies to their massive neighbors, to better understand the connection between galaxies.

Opportunities for Students

For the teaching component of her project, Christensen will create a set of computational exercises, labs, and open-ended research projects for students that will be integrated into the physics curriculum. Participating in these innovative projects will enable Grinnell students to develop their dedication to truth, evidence, and critical thought.

Christensen and her colleagues had earlier implemented a computational lab into the 200-level mechanics course with the support of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant. Building on this work, Christensen will improve the overall education of physics students by incorporating computational problem-solving, an increasingly fundamental component of a modern physics education.

The NSF CAREER grant also will support summer research projects for a dozen Grinnell students, including opportunities to present at national conferences and to visit collaborators at research institutions. In addition, Christensen’s curricular development will address a gap in computational skill development that the physics department has observed between male and female physics majors.

Female students, including physics majors, are substantially less likely to enroll in computer science classes than male students. Christensen will continue her work in support of diversity and inclusion. This will include inviting a grant-funded speaker to campus each year to speak about diversity and inclusion in the sciences.

Christensen is Grinnell’s second faculty member to receive a CAREER grant. The first was Eliza Kempton, associate professor of physics, who was awarded a CAREER grant in 2017 to conduct research on exoplanets and develop a spatial reasoning course and peer-mentoring program for STEM students.

A graduate of Carleton College, Christensen received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She was the Theory Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona and a recipient of the NSF Graduate Student Research Fellowship. Christensen uses simulations of galaxies to determine how different physical processes drive their evolution. Her research, focusing on star-forming gas and outflows of material from galaxies, has been published in Nature, The Astrophysical Journal and The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.