Aerospace Engineering

Jasper Wan
He is an 11th grade student who is interested to work on an Aerospace Engineering research program.

Jasper’s primary academic interests are physics and engineering. He is a member of his school’s aerospace club and he also recently competed in the BBHO physics competition with a strong performance.

Learning objectives

• To measure the mass of supermassive black holes using the reverberation mapping (RM) technique, which relies on multi-band photometry, I developed expertise in programming with Python, utilizing the Jupyter Notebook interactive coding environment, installing FORTRAN packages, cloning GitHub repositories, and preparing publication-quality reports in LaTeX.
• These transferable skills form a crucial foundation for modern scientific research and have broad applicability beyond conducting RM measurements.

What challenges did he face?

• At times, installation issues (such as with the JAVELIN package) proved to be even more challenging than learning a new programming language, as the variety of operating systems often leads to new errors that need to be resolved.

How did our program help him?

• Jasper very quickly picked up on LaTeX so that he was able to write an entire report in that language (which is standard for astrophysics publications).
• Jasper completed the mentorship program with a project exploring the measurements of mass of supermassive black holes using the technique of reverberation mapping (RM), which utilizes multi-band photometry. He learned to program in Python, utilizing the Jupyter Notebook interactive coding environment, installing FORTRAN packages, and cloning GitHub repositories.

Matched Professor

The mentor is a Research Scientist at the University of Washington. He specializes in the analysis of time series data, using variability information to classify and characterize quasars and variable stars. He has received several awards, including UW Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow.