The globular cluster Messier 13 shown above is a massive cluster of several hundred thousand stars that formed more than eleven billion years ago. Will’s project aims to one day observe clusters like M13 much closer in time to when they formed. Photo taken by Will Jarvis.
Tell me a little about yourself. I'm a PhD student in the Department of Astronomy at UMass Amherst, currently transitioning from my first to second year, working with Kate Whitaker. I did my bachelor's at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in astrophysics, where I mostly worked on active galactic nuclei (AGN), the intensely luminous cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, before deciding to try something different for my PhD.
Outside of research, I play drums — I drum for the pep band at UMass and have played in a few bands, including a space rock band called Live from Mars that has two albums out (I write most of our lyrics). I also compete in ballroom dance, mostly international waltz and foxtrot this past semester, plus rumba and cha-cha, and I love lindy hop (a style of swing dance). I write poetry and do astrophotography on the side.
Will and partner Sonia dancing the rumba at the MIT Open Ballroom Dance Competition where they took second place.
I grew up in Wisconsin Dells, the self-proclaimed water park capital of the world, with more water parks per capita than almost anywhere on Earth. My high school job was at a local science museum, where I was the caretaker of a backup Mir space station module (built to launch and replace the actual Mir Space Station in 1991, but abandoned and purchased by a local businessman after the fall of Berlin Wall). So for a few years, it was just the astronauts and me looking after space stations.
How did you get interested in astronomy? I was drawn to aviation and space from a young age. My grandfather flew the P-38 Lightning in World War II, which inspired a love of aviation early on, and visiting my uncle, the chief autopilot engineer at Boeing, for a tour of the manufacturing facility when I was about 8 left a big impression. I started going to the EAA AirVenture airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where I met astronaut Kent Rominger in high school, which pushed me further toward science and STEM. Watching Star Trek growing up really sealed my interest in studying space specifically.
My turning point was working with the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (run out of West Virginia University) as a high school senior. I got to use the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope for a week, including being woken in the middle of the night and given half an hour to do whatever I wanted with the telescope. I spent about 24 hours trying to reduce and analyze the data afterward so I could present it in a talk a day and a half later. After that experience, I was hooked.
What is your favorite part about Copenhagen? DAWN? The community at DAWN has been great — the grad students and postdocs are lovely, and everyone is genuinely interested in talking about science and answering questions. I'm in a bit of a unique position since globular clusters aren't something DAWN typically works on. That’s actually opened a lot of doors, since people are curious to learn, and it's let me reconnect with some AGN conversations from my undergrad work too. A nice full-circle moment!
As for Copenhagen itself, the city is beautiful and biking everywhere makes it easy to get around. The music scene has been a true highlight for me. I've been going to open jams a couple of times a week and have played drums on stage 8 or 9 times since arriving. The jazz scene here is something else entirely.
What motivated you to apply to an international summer research program? I wanted real experience doing science in a different country and culture, and DAWN had the right people to make that worthwhile, with strong faculty and postdocs across the board. I'd always wanted to study abroad as an undergrad but could never make the timing work. I did two REUs in college, in Hawaii and Nantucket, but living in a European country is a different experience than living on a U.S. island. I also already knew DAWN postdoctoral fellow Conor McPartland from a previous REU, so it was nice walking into DAWN with an existing connection, even though our research has diverged since then.
Can you tell me about your summer research project? This summer I'm building one of the first samples of globular clusters at high redshift, looking back across roughly 10 billion years of cosmic time. I'm focused on the most massive clusters from this era, since the smaller ones are too faint to detect with current data. Studying the massive ones tells us how globular clusters formed in the early universe and lets us compare their properties to clusters we see locally today, including how much mass they lose over time. I am focusing on looking at clusters around the most massive host galaxies in the universe, to understand why those galaxies seem to have an excess of clusters, and whether their clusters are unusually massive.
I'm also working with DAWN faculty Johan Fynbo on a machine learning side project to build a training set such that an algorithm can learn to identify globular clusters automatically rather than relying on time-consuming visual inspection. This becomes increasingly important as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) produces more deep fields and as upcoming telescopes like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Euclid open up much larger areas of sky. At scales such as these, we'll need machine learning to find not just hundreds of globular cluster candidates, but expanding to millions or possibly even billions across the sky.
What skills or knowledge have you been working on developing so far this summer? The biggest skill I’m developing is learning how to use a software called Prospector to do spectral energy distribution modeling of the cluster candidates. This is a technique where you take JWST imaging across multiple wavelengths, extract the light from each cluster, and model it to estimate physical properties like mass and stellar age. It's a new methodology for me, so it's taken real time to learn.
I've also been developing and leading workshops as a DAWN-IRES senior scholar, which is new territory. I’ve mentored students individually before, but not designed time-constrained workshops on a range of topics. One I led was on how to read a scientific paper: I wrote a tutorial and then walked students through an actual paper together, discussing strategies for pulling out the information you need efficiently. It seemed especially useful since their research advisors have already started handing them papers to get through.
What Danish word or phrase have you picked up that you now use constantly? Smørrebrød — the classic Danish open sandwich. I can't get enough of it. I spent a week with my cousins recently who showed me how to make several versions; it's traditionally made with rye bread and topped with things like pickled or curried herring, roast beef, or hard-boiled eggs, sometimes mixed, sometimes kept separate. I'm determined to recreate it back home, even if tracking down all the herring varieties might be a challenge — my partner wants to learn to make the rye bread too.