Elizabeth Moné

Hello! My name is Elizabeth Moné (pronouced like the artist Monet, no relation as for as I'm aware though!). I'm currently a senior undergraduate Physics major with a concentration in astrophysics and a minor in aerospace engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

At Georgia Tech I've had the priviledge to work on three projects in physics and aerospace engineering. Currently I work in computational cosmology. Over the summer of 2024 I also had the great experience of doing an REU at Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Eploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). More information on my research is located in the Research Tab.

Outside of academics and research I enjoy reading and baking as well as art.

August 2021-Present (Expected Graduation: May 2025)

Major: Physics (Concentration in Astrophysics)

Minor: Aerospace Enginnering

GPA: 4.0

August 2022-Present

Principal Investigator: Dr. John Wise

You can find the research website here: Computational Cosmology

My Research: I've been working on developing code to quantify differences between halos expected to host a direct collapse black hole (DCBH) and those that are not, within the Renaissance simulations. Primarily, I used statistical analysis to compare the two distributions to first see if there was a quantifiable difference. Then, I use supervised machine learning in python package SciKit-Learn to carry out feature selection on the halos. From this we hope to develop a machine learning algorithim using support vector classification to implement in various simulation codes to produce a probability that a halo will host a DCBH. A preliminary poster on this topic can be found in the "Works" tab.

Summer 2024

Principal Investigator: Dr. Claude-André Faucher-Giguère

You can find the research website here: Galaxy Formation

My Research: The hot phase gas in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of high mass galaxies is critical in sustaining necessary accretion onto galaxies for star formation rates and forms the intermediary between the galaxy and intergalactic medium. Turbulence provides 10-40% of the energy that supports the CGM. By using the FIRE project simulations I characterized this turbulence by calculating creating and optimizing a python function to efficently calculate the velocity structure function (VSF) and comparing to idealized Kolmogorov theory. I found that within the inertial range the VSF matches Kolmogorov theory with minimal deviations. Additionally, I used the package Meshoid to develop visualizations of the turbulence in the CGM. You can find more on this work in a poster and unpublished note in the "Works" section.

Summer 2023

Principal Investigator: Dr. Pranay Seshadri

My Research: I performed energy analysis on the Trinity explosion to calculate the yeild. I followed the rpocess originally taken by Sir Geoffrey Taylor in the 1950s but with more advanced tools such as modern coding and picture analysis. More about this research can be found in my paper titled "Revisiting Taylor’s Analysis of the Trinity Test."

Other Work: I worked on assisting Dr. Seshadri with class materials for Fluid Dynamics courses at Georgia Tech, including example python notebooks that can be found here. Additionally, I worked on developing tutorial notebooks for the python package Equadratures.

Summer 2022

Principal Investigators: Dr. Zhigang Jiang, Dr. Philip First

My Research: I worked on testing simulations of different boron nitride and polyethelene combinations in radiation sheilding. We wanted to find the optimal configuration for sheilding radiation on lunar missions. I worked mostly on data visualization and adjusting the C based simulation code Geant4. More information can be found in the article titled "Designing a boron nitride polyethylene composite for shielding neutrons" of which I am second author.