"Go For It"

“Go for it - astronomy and astrophysics are rich and exciting fields that offer plenty of opportunities for young scientists to contribute. Master the basics, keep up with the latest discoveries, don't stop asking questions - and finding answers."

When I recently learned about this whiz kid, I became truly amazed with her achievements as a student and as a young scientist.

She was a consistent honors student since elementary, a Valedictorian at the Philippine Science High School in 2001 and a Summa Cum Laude, Physics major at the Ateneo De Manila University in 2005.

Immediately after graduating in college, she took up the High Energy Physics masters-level course at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy and graduated in 2006.

And presently, she is taking up her doctorate course in Astrophysics at the prestigious Princeton University in New Jersey.

As for her accomplishments as a scholar, she has the following:

• Honorable Mention, Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award, American Astronomical Society (January 2008)
• Centennial Fellowship, Princeton University Graduate School (2006-2010)
• Merit Prize Fellowship Grant, Princeton University Graduate School (2006-2010)
• Martin Schwarschild Graduate Fellowship, Princeton University (2006-2007)
• Academic Scholarship, Ateneo de Manila University (2001-2005)
• Merit Science Scholarship, Department of Science and Technology (2001-2005)

Another interesting work of her is the culmination of a 5-year long campaign to find particular types of black holes and I quote,

"This is like searching for a "needle in a haystack" since the objects we are targeting are very rare and are not immensely bright. We searched through a million objects and found 900 of these ones. My work is focused on figuring out how rare these objects really are. This is not as simple as it sounds because one has to carefully figure out the difference between *how many objects we have found* versus *how many objects there really are.* For example, the telescopes will miss those objects that are too faint to be detected, so those have to be taken into account."

This whiz kid is no other than 24-year old Reinabelle Co Reyes, a second year PhD student at the Princeton University.

You can also visit her site at http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~rreyes/ to know more about her.

May her story become an inspiration to all of us!

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