1st year Graduate Gabby Gelinas Awarded Prestigious Nuclear-Studies Fellowship
It is a pleasure to share the exciting news of Gabby Gelinas, a dedicated 1st year graduate student in subatomic physics, who has been honoured with the notable International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship!
This significant award is bestowed upon outstanding young women pursuing Nuclear-related studies spanning physics, other sciences or the Arts. Its primary objectives include bolstering the representation of women in the field, providing financial support to alleviate the costs of graduate programs and opportunities to participate in IAEA internships and workshops.
Gabby’s journey into subatomic physics started in high school when a collaboration with the University of Calgary Physics and Astronomy Isotope Science Laboratory sparked her interest in the applications of nuclear physics in environmental science. This early experience prompted her to complete an undergraduate degree at the University of Calgary (BSc Honours Physics) where she worked in instrument commissioning and method development for sample processing with the Isotope Science Laboratory.
Her experiences with the Isotope Science Laboratory cemented her fascination with the intricacies of obtaining quality measurements. Eager to continue, Gabby pursued opportunities at TRIUMF Canada's particle accelerator centre to further investigate the process of making a measurement with large-scale complex equipment, expanding her interests to fundamental physics research.
In 2022 she was one of two students in Canada to be awarded TRIUMF’s Richard E. Azuma Fellowship. This gave her the chance to work with the TITAN Collaboration (TRIUMF’s Ion Trap for Atomic and Nuclear science where she assisted in improving the mass measurement precision of the lab’s multiple-reflection time-of-flight mass spectrometer.
Motivated by the technical challenges and scientific possibilities at TRIUMF, Gabby has returned to pursue her master’s degree where she is now working with the DarkLight Collaboration.
The DarkLight Experiment, based at TRIUMF’s electron linear accelerator, seeks to probe the 17 MeV mass range in search of a dark matter particle known as a dark boson, potentially linking the standard model of particle physics to the dark sector. As Gabby explains, “Astrophysicists have observed light bending in seemingly open space, as if it was passing by a massive object. There must be something present to cause this bending that we can't observe, which we call dark matter. If we can someday find a dark boson, that would be a potential tool to study dark matter.”
Congratulations, Gabby, on this well-deserved honour! We wish you all the best in your future contributions to the world of nuclear physics!
Learn More:
TRIUMF Links:
- TRIUMF: Canada's particle accelerator centre
- TITAN Collaboration
- Richard E. Azuma Fellowship
- DarkLight Experiment