Biography

Bridget Andersen (CLAS, 2018) graduated with a B.S. in Astronomy-Physics and a B.A. in Computer Science. She was part of various research projects at the University of Virginia (UVA), including an internship with Professor Craig Sarazin in which she used X-ray observations to reveal the origin of key features of the galaxy cluster Abell 3653. She also acted as the lead observer on the UVA Occultation Team, which allowed her to travel to South Africa under National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funding to observe an occultation of MU69 and, later, Georgia under a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to observe an occultation of Triton. She completed her senior thesis with Scott Ransom at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, where she extended his binary pulsar searching software. She attended Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico and another at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She also won the Goldwater Scholarship while at UVA. She will be attending McGill University to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics.