Student earns undergraduate women in physics award

Goucher College student Tes DeJaeger ’22 was awarded the Best Poster honors at the American Physical Society’s regional Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP), which took place January 17-19, 2020, at the University of Maryland, College Park. DeJaeger, who studies engineering, presented a poster titled “Energy Measurement of Electron Beams from a Pyroelectric Crystal Accelerator.”

“It felt amazing to win the award,” DeJaeger said. “I felt a stigma when I’d say I was from Goucher College … everyone was more interested in the research done at Harvard or Johns Hopkins. But walking on stage after my name was called filled my stride with pride for my small school.”

The poster culminated from the research she conducted last year as part of Goucher’s Summer Science Research Program. There, she worked in Associate Professor Rodney Yoder’s physics lab to assist Yoder’s research in the experimental physics of particle beams. Along with another student, Yoder said that DeJaeger worked to “build and test an energy measurement system … and showed that the method was sensitive and accurate enough for well-defined results.”

Yoder noted that DeJaeger’s CUWiP award is a “significant achievement,” as a panel of scientists judged her work independently.