Astrophysicist and Science Communicator, who is also an Assistant Professor at Princeton, Alexandra Amon, is encouraging aspiring scientists from the Caribbean to follow their dreams.
“I am very proud to have started on the tiny islands of Trinidad and Tobago,” she said on her website.
The T&T national is among this year’s 126 recipients of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships which is a two-year $75,000 fellowship that is awarded annually to early-career researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.
Amon, was one out of 24 recipients under the category of physics to be selected. Other categories include Mathematics, Earth System Science, Economics and Neuroscience.
On her website, Amon and her group focuses on the ground-breaking Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will image more than 1 billion galaxies.
The Princeton University website said the Observatory located on a mountaintop in Chile, is nearly complete and will capture the cosmos in exquisite detail. Using the largest camera ever built, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years and create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the universe.
“We use galaxies to map the large-scale structure and confront questions about the composition and evolution of our universe,” she said.
Amon stated that their ultimate goal is to understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
Before Princeton, Amon was a Kavli Fellow at Stanford in Professor Wechsler’s group where she devoted three years to the Dark Energy Survey Year three cosmology analysis.
The 2025 fellows came from 51 institutions across the United States of America and Canada and is one of the most coveted awards for young researchers.
Many have gone on to become influential scientists in their fields.
