Assistant Professor Wen-fai Fong receives prestigious Packard Fellowship

Assistant Professor Wen-fai Fong, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has received the prestigious 2021 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The foundation named Fong and 19 others as the nation’s most innovative, early-career scientists and engineers. The fellowship, established in 1988, includes an unrestricted grant of $875,000 over five years to pursue innovative and experimental research.

“I view the Packard Fellowship as a life-changing opportunity for me,” said Fong. “With it, I will be able to pursue high-risk, interdisciplinary scientific endeavors that I have been dreaming of, but have never had the resources to carry out.”

Fong and her research group are investigating the enigmatic origins of the universe’s fastest explosions, known as transients, and their host galaxy environments. She is interested in the origins of these transients, the types of environments they explode into, and the nature and composition of the material ejected. To do this work, Fong and her group use a large variety of telescopes on the ground and in space that span radio, optical, near-infrared, and X-ray wavelengths.

Read more about the Packard Fellowship in Northwestern Now.