FNALMarcelle Soares-Santos: outstanding contributionFNAL
Brazilian astronomer Marcelle Soares-Santos received the 2014 Alvin Tollestrup Award from the Universities Research Association for outstanding work conducted by a postdoctoral researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Holder of a PhD in astronomy from the University of São Paulo (USP), Soares-Santos has been working at Fermilab since 2010 and was recognized for her contributions to the study of dark matter. Her post-doctoral research concentrated on the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the purpose of which is to observe 300 million galaxies and use them to determine the evolution of the expansion of the Universe. “I helped build and install the Dark Energy camera, the DECam,” Soares-Santos says, referring to the camera, a key tool in the project, that has been in operation since 2012 at the Blanco telescope installed at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, in Chile. Her research also hopes to help answer questions about dark matter, a hypothetical form of energy said to be distributed throughout space. “I developed a method to detect clusters of galaxies and use that method to study dark matter,” she explains. “Soares-Santos works with data to develop new ways to understand how the Universe was formed,” says Brenna Flaugher, head of the Astrophysics Department of Fermilab.
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