Derod Deal

My story

Since I was a kid, I have been intrigued by the weather, and I used to self-study meteorology with NOAA’s JetStream educational website. I built weather station instruments from scratch with household materials, including the anemometer, wind vane, and barometer. As I grew older, I started to code the instruments with Arduino and digital sensors like the BMP280 pressure sensor and a 3D-printed rain gauge I made in high school. As an extension of my fascination with meteorological instruments, I grew to love astronomy instruments. During high school, I followed the Radio JOVE community and researched how to build a radio telescope from scratch.

For the past four years, I have been studying masers near high mass star-forming regions and their roles in tracing star formation processes such as accretion and outflows with Dr. Adam Ginsburg. I have really enjoyed developing code to fit Gaussians to measure masers and making connections with the data I have, to real astrophysical phenomenon.

Currently, my main goal is to get into graduate school and pursue a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

TEAM-UP Together Scholarship Recipient in 2022 and 2023