Erika Holmbeck, fifth-year graduate student in the Theoretical Nuclear Astrophysics and Galactic Archaeology groups of Professors Rebecca Surman and Timothy Beers, won the “Best Poster Award” for her work on Characterizing r-Process Sites Through Actinide Production at the ninth edition of the Nuclear Physics in Astrophysics Conference (NPA-IX).
Held this year at Schloß Waldthausen near Frankfurt, Germany, NPA is a biennial, multi-disciplinary, international meeting to discuss current progress and challenges in the field of nuclear astrophysics. The one-week conference hosted nearly 150 physicists ranging from nuclear experimentalists and theorists to astronomers and chemo-dynamic modelers. Holmbeck presented an academic poster of her research focusing on measuring heavy-element abundances in metal-poor stars and using those measurements to investigate the production of actinides by the rapid neutron-capture (“r”) process. Her poster was one of three winners out of 56 poster participants.
Originally published by at physics.nd.edu on October 07, 2019.