CHTM Faculty Selected for 2020 Women in STEM Award

June 22, 2020 - CHTM

Congratulations are in order! CHTM and Assistant Professor at Physics, Dr. Tara Drake, is one of 8 UNM faculty members at the University of New Mexico selected for the 2020 Women in STEM awards.

The recipients this year are Rebecca Bixby, a research assistant professor in biology; Tara Drake, an assistant professor in physics and astronomy; Heather Edgar, an associate professor in anthropology; Tamar Ginossar, an associate professor in communication and journalism; Maryam Hojati, an assistant professor in civil, construction and environmental engineering; Mousumi Roy, an associate professor in physics and astronomy, Lani Tsinnajinnie, an assistant professor in community and regional planning, and Jin Zhang, an assistant professor in earth and planetary sciences.

The Women in STEM awards are hosted by Advance at UNM in collaboration with the UNM Office of Academic Affairs. Advance is a five-year National Science Foundation program to recruit, retain and promote women and minority STEM faculty. The WIS awards, now in their fifth year, have totaled more than $266,000 to date.

Julia Fulghum, director of Advance at UNM, said the selected proposals are an exciting representation of the work of women in STEM around campus.

Dr. Drake's proposal is entitled ,"Construction of a Fast Optical Frequency Sweeper for Managing Thermal Instabilities in Microresonator Frequency Combs.”

Optical microresonators, tiny rings with a diameter similar to that of a human hair, are capable of simultaneously generating hundreds of colors of light, and have many potential uses, including chemical identification, creating more precise GPS clocks, and detecting Earth-like exoplanets. “Anything this small experiences temperature very differently than we do; what we think of as an unchanging temperature, a microresonator will experience as many rapid temperature shifts, happening at the rate of several million a second,” Drake said.

“In order to study this thermal noise, researchers need measurement tools that are fast enough to keep up.”

 

This story has been exerpted from the UNM Newsroom. To see the full article, please click here. To read more about ADVANCE, click here.

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