Listening to the Universe

Sarah Caudill
Sarah Caudill
Sarah Caudill, Ph.D., at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Coming up in April, the next issue of Stetson Magazine will look at the path one Stetson graduate took to participating in one of the discoveries of the century.

Here’s an excerpt from Janie Graziani’s article, “Listening to the Universe.”

Last September, Earth received a billion-year-old message from the universe, and 2006 graduate Sarah Caudill, Ph.D., was there to receive it. A native of Volusia County, Caudill was a science geek at a very early age.

“I was a pretty studious little kid,” she remembered. “I loved to go to the library to check out science books and National Geographic documentaries.” Her love of science led her to take “as many advanced-placement science classes as I could,” at New Smyrna Beach High School.

Caudill’s studious nature earned her a scholarship to Stetson, “a great place to get started on a research path,” she said.

“Right away I got individualized attention,” said Caudill, “especially from Dr. Kevin Riggs in the physics department, who used to spend hours and hours helping me prepare for the physics GRE test to get into graduate school, and from Dr. Tandy Grubbs, who set me up with a research project early on.”

Caudill was attending Stetson when she first became involved with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). She had the opportunity to do research with LIGO early on through Stetson’s summer undergraduate research fellowship. In 2005, Caudill went to California Institute of Technology (Caltech), one of the labs that runs LIGO, and then continued her research at Stetson through her senior year.

Read the entire article on Caudill’s work with LIGO and how it may usher in a new era in physics in the next issue of Stetson Magazine.