Professor Wen-fai Fong awarded an Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation

Professor Wen-fai Fong of the Department of Physics and Astronomy has been awarded an Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department.

“My CAREER research is rooted in high-impact frontiers in time-domain astronomy, and will explore two of the universe’s fastest-timescale transients in unprecedented detail: fast radio bursts (FRBs) and short-duration gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs). SGRBs originate from neutron star mergers, and are directly connected to multi-messenger astronomy, while the origins of FRBs are not clearly known. My group will use a wide range of observational facilities around the world and in space to study the galaxy environments of both populations,” said Wen-fai Fong.

“As host galaxies represent the “homes” of these transients, they have proved to be extremely important tools in understanding origins of mysterious transients. We will pair our observations with modeling and provide large legacy samples to diversify our existing knowledge, or in the case of FRBs, lay important groundwork,” said Fong.

“I will also partner with DEI experts and local initiatives to develop sustainable professional development programming at Northwestern to promote the persistence of under-represented students in STEM at the undergraduate and graduate levels,” said Fong.

Visit Professor Wen-fai Fong’s website.

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