Turaba Rahman, a senior at Kent State University and in the Honors College, grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh. When she was little, she was enamored with stargazing. Where she lived, it was hard to see the sky through the buildings and lights that blocked it, but she always tried her best to spot constellations. Ever since she can remember being frustrated while trying to draw the perfect star, she had fallen in love with the giant spheres of dust and gas.
This is one of the reasons why Turaba decided to jump on a second research and internship opportunity involving the observation of stars! Last year, she secured a position at NASA-affiliated Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland for an internship in star formation research. Now, the physics major has completed another summer internship full of research experience, this time in Europe.
Chalmers University of Technology partners with the University of Virginia to coordinate the Chalmers Astrophysics and Space Sciences Summer (CASSUM) Research Fellowship. This 71-day internship is hosted in Gothenburg, Sweden and accepts around 30 specially selected university students from all over the world.
The CASSUM Research Fellowship isn’t only for undergraduate students, as masters students are encouraged to apply for the internship opportunity as well. Turaba was the second youngest in her entire cohort during her time there. Through this internship, she also gained credit not only towards her physics major coursework, but towards her Honors College curriculum coursework as well.
The application process for acceptance into a program such as this is very competitive, as the fellowship considers applicants from all over the world. It consists of an essay submission providing the student’s main motives for participating in the internship program, as well as how it will help them meet their future goals. Turaba was also asked to select her top 3-4 choices for work on a summer project from a list of 21 various options, ranging from observational research to periodical research. Each research option focused on a different topic and was assigned a dedicated supervisor and/or co-supervisor, most who were based at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. This Honors College student was interested in observational work: analyzing data from observations of telescopes, especially the ones related to star formation. In her last internship, Turaba had a positive experience in astrophysics research on star formation, so she wanted to continue down that path for this fellowship as well. The application process was just the start though, as the interview experience, in Turaba’s opinion, was even more intimidating.
The Kent State student was selected to participate in the interview process concerning all of the observational projects she had listed as her top choices for experience on her application. In the initial interview, Turaba spoke with the scientists who would be supervising each of the preferred projects on Turaba’s short list. The physics major describes that she had to study each of the preferred projects that she was interviewing for so that she was well versed in not only the observational topic, but also why she wanted to be on the team that researched that specific topic. Turaba describes that the hardest part was that English is not her first language, so she wanted to make sure that she could communicate and explain her thoughts thoroughly. Although, waking up for a 7:00 a.m. interview with scientists who are located in a different time zone was also not an easy task.
This 71-day internship was fully-funded by the initiative CICO (Chalmers Initiative on Cosmic Origins), salary included, and it fulfilled a life-long dream of Turaba’s to go to Europe. She described that it was approximately a 15-hour flight, but compared to the 30-hour plane ride she had to take to get back home, this first excursion was a cake walk. She remembers that the first thing she did when she stepped off the plane was smell the fresh, crisp Swedish air.
Turaba was selected to work on a project titled "Protostellar Outflow Properties and Kinematics in High-Mass Star Forming Regions”, focusing research on analyzing data from the ALMA observatory’s telescope in Chile. She was supervised by Chi Yan (Paul) Law (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica - Arcetri) and Co-supervised by Kotomi Taniguchi (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan), Jonathon Tan (Chalmers University/University of Virginia), Yichen Zhang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) and Rubén Fedriani (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia - Granada). These outflows that the project focused on are “bursts of dust and gas,” in which Turaba looked for five properties: opening angle of the outflow, mass of the outflow, momentum of the outflow, kinetic energy of the outflow, and orientation of the outflow. This was all part of the process to study and learn why these massive stars form. She stated that she specifically looked for spectral lines, made of chemical compounds like silicon monoxide and carbon dioxide, and analyzed them to derive those five properties. She has hopes that her work on the project will be published by February of 2025. The culmination of her summer work, ‘Outflow Properties and Kinematics in High-mass Star Forming Regions,’ the results of which are still changing with the research Turaba is continuing, was presented by Turaba at the CASSUM-CICO-VICO Summer Student Symposium in July 2024. Turaba was also invited to present her research this past October in the American Physical Society Eastern Great Lakes Section Fall 2024 Meeting at Marietta College, and even received a grant from the Kent State Office of Student Research to travel there!
Throughout the summer program, a meeting took place with her research team every two weeks where Turaba would be assigned data to complete. She was responsible for emailing updates to her supervisors, as well as to provide updates and findings in her meetings two times a week. In these update meetings, the scientists would also teach about the given subject and provide suggestions and guidance, which would help aid Turaba in her dissection of the data. In addition to the two weekly meetings, a separate meeting would take place weekly for interns in all research sections of the fellowship program, so that everyone would have the opportunity to share what they were working on. Turaba describes finding this part of the program very interesting, and she loved getting to see the work that all of the other interns were completing during their time in the internship program.
During the 71-day program, a colloquium took place each Friday, where a scientist would present a lecture on something related to the study for all of the researchers, in which the student interns were also invited to attend . Afterwards, they would have a discussion about the different research papers relevant to their studies and Turaba stated that she learned a lot from those who completed studies on similar topics before her. One example of this is how she learned about different softwares that aided in analyzing radio data, which is needed in dissecting the five properties of high mass star outflow.
In between her research, Turaba took full advantage of exploring all that Sweden had to offer, and she also got to visit the nearby countries of Denmark and Norway, which were just a train ride away. Turaba explained that the atmosphere of the fellowship provided a healthy work-life balance and that she didn’t feel the pressure to put all of her focus on her work at all times.
When asked to pick a favorite part of the fellowship opportunity, Turaba had difficulty answering. Having completed and experienced so much, it was hard to pick just one memory as a favorite. Turaba loved the opportunity to meet individuals from around the world, and now has friends from other countries like Greece, Spain, and more. One memory did stand out, though, when the interns had the opportunity to share cultures. Turaba remembers a potluck where the interns cooked dishes from their culture and shared it with the others in the cohort to introduce where they were from. Turaba reminisced that it was like their own little tour of the world in the hostel they lived in that summer.
“That would be one of the best memories I have ever had.”
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HEADER PHOTO CAPTION: Turaba Rahman and the other interns from Chalmers Astrophysics and Space Sciences Summer Research Fellowship standing for a group photo. Turaba is fifth from the left.
Media Contact: Stephanie Moskal, smoskal@kent.edu, 330-672-2312