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Past Postings from our "News and Stories" Section

Spring 2025 -- If you are frequent reader of our News and Stories section, you may recognize the initials "HHM" as the author of many articles seen here in the past year or two. We are overjoyed that Hannah Means graduated in May 2024 with a BS in Physics and a minor in Astronomy, and is progressing nicely with her planned career in science communication.

In addition to her STEM courses at BGSU, Hannah took many English classes including creative writing, with the aim of building her own curriculum around science writing.  Hannah also did a summer internship with the American Institute of Physics magazine Physics Today in summer 2023 in Maryland, and wrote articles for them through December 2024.

Over that time, Hannah published over a dozen news stories in this "trade magazine" which gets sent monthly to every physicist and astronomer with a membership in the AIP (circulation over 100,000 people!). A few favorites include:

• NASA cancels flight-ready lunar rover (13 December 2024)
• UK coalition gears up to demonstrate commercial viability of fusion energy(Physics Today 77 (12), 22–23 (2024) )
  
• What’s up with Planet Nine? (Physics Today 77 (11), 22–23 (2024) )
• Impending ship retirement leaves ocean-drilling researchers adrift (Physics Today 76 (9), 21–22 (2023) )

Hannah is excited to report that she has started working as a journal specialist at Frontiers (a scientific journal publisher) helping to curate research article collections with researchers around the world.  We wish her the best in her new role, and look forward to other science articles she authors!

Fall 2024 -- Each year the Bowman Family Undergraduate Research Award is presented to a BGSU undergraduate student who exhibits the highest quality independent study and research in Physics. Katherine Symons received the award for her analysis of period changes among RR Lyrae variable stars in the globular star cluster M107 (learn more here). She and Hannah Means worked together on the project, with Symons focusing on coding analysis programs and Means graphing light curves.  They confirmed that the periods of four of the 17 RRL gradually change as the stars’ internal structure evolves under the influence of their declining hydrogen and helium fuel. Given the slow rates of stellar evolution, this approach is one of the few ways stellar evolution can be confirmed and measured directly on a human timescale.