Dr. Keivan Stassun, Dr. Michael Watson, and Dr. Arnold Burger from Fisk University will partner with Dr. J. Kelly Holley-Bockelmann from Vanderbilt and Dr. James Jackson from Boston University (BU) in a project to be known as Graduate Opportunities at Fisk in Astronomy and Astrophysics Research or GO-FAAR. The University of Cape Town (UCT) will also be a partner in this extensive collaboration.
GO-FAAR will leverage the successful Fisk-Vanderbilt masters-to-PhD bridge program to attract, train and mentor students. The Bridge program will be expanded to include an instrumentation track thanks to the partnership with BU. The GO-FAAR program will also build a new instrumentation lab and develop a graduate instrumentation course for Fisk students.
The GO-FAAR research projects will include the areas of astronomical instrumentation, computational astrophysics and observational astronomy. The instrumentation projects include the development of high-energy detectors and space- and ground-based instrumentation. The observational astronomy component of the GO-FAAR program will investigate stellar astrophysics, star formation, transiting exoplanets, and supernovae cosmology. Each of these topics has a lead scientist from one of the partnering organizations who will serve as a point of contact and student mentor for the research program.
