Christina Kreisch

Biography

I am a rising senior at Washington University in St. Louis pursuing a double major in physics and mathematics. I have been a member of the Society of Physics Students at WUSTL since I was a freshman. As a sophomore, I helped the officers plan activities such as homework nights, trips to our off-campus observatory, observing with our on-campus telescope, and liquid nitrogen nights. I also put together the Historian report the end of my sophomore year and our chapter received an Honorable Mention. As a Junior I was the Historian for our chapter and have been very involved with planning events. In particular, I helped plan and execute our first demo night. It was so successful that we received Third Place in the SPS photo contest. As a Senior, I will be the President of our chapter. In the fall I participated in the International University Physics Competition and received the Gold Medal. I have a strong interest in astrophysics and have presented at ten conferences. My research career began while in high school when I worked on the spectroscopic performance of different combinations of PMTs and scintillators at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2011 I have been performing Mars research; one project has involved working with a spectrometer that orbits Mars. I have also traveled to the Mojave Desert to perform rover mobility tests with JPL. Last summer I had an internship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I performed research on the hydrodynamics in a galaxy cluster merger and am preparing a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. This summer I will be interning at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I will be performing cosmology research. I plan to pursue a PhD in astrophysics and teach at the university level.