Melissa Diamond has been awarded the Gardner Fellowship in our department. Diamond is a third-year student working with David Kaplan.  Her current research is focused on a project analyzing how polarized light from AGNs or other objects could be used to detect particles/fields with axion-like couplings to photons.

Diamond is the 11th Gardner Fellow. The fellowship was founded by William Gardner (Ph.D., ’68), who received his Ph.D. in physics under Prof. Warren Moos and had a successful career in fiber optics and telecommunications at Bell Laboratories. Gardner now generously provides support for one of the department’s highest priorities-enabling graduate students to dive into research from the start.