The Letson Internship, offered by the School of Physics at Georgia Tech, provides a summer stipend, housing, and possible conference travel to a student conducting full-time research with a faculty member in the School.  Only a handful are given each summer, and one of this year’s winners is Carlos Márcio de Oliveira e Silva Filho. 

Carlos is a third-year Physics and Mathematics major from Brazil who has been extremely active in undergraduate research.  He serves as an undergraduate research assistant at the Center of Nonlinear Dynamics and for the IceCube Collaboration, which maintains and operates the largest neutrino telescope in the world, located in the South Pole. His research has been recognized with three Tower Awards, one PURA award, a published paper by the Astrophysics Journal, and now the Letson Internship.

He will use funding from the Letson Internship to continue his research with IceCube Collaboration, with the goal of studying and understanding a type of particle called neutrinos.  Not much is known about neutrinos other than that they are very hard to detect and are one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Carlos’s role in the research is to identify possible sources outside our galaxy that produce the neutrinos we observe at the IceCube Observatory. He’s currently investigating a class of objects called blazars, which are supermassive black holes (hundreds of times greater than our sun) that are a galaxy's heart, actively consuming surrounding matter and expelling it as a very bright and energetic jet pointed in our direction.  Dr. Ignacio Taboada will supervise the project.

For Carlos, the internship will be an invaluable experience on his path to graduate school and an academic position and hopefully result in his second journal article publication.  But all of that is still very much a work in progress.  Carlos reflected that  “life is unpredictable, which is one factor that makes it beautiful. Reading a book is not as thrilling when you know the ending.”  His involvement with the Honors Program has also brought some great experiences.  He serves as a member of HLC, the Honors Leadership Council, which is the student leadership organization in the Honors Program.  He brought his love of research and the Honors Program(HP) together by representing the HP at the Georgia Collegiate Honors Council annual research conference, where he won a second-place award for his research paper on blazars.  But his best HP experience has been in the classroom.  As unlikely as it sounds, it was an English class that was the most compelling for this Physics and Math double major.  He took an HP version of ENGL 1102 with Dr. Eric Lewis, who Carlos said

went above and beyond and is, overall, a genuinely lovely and incredibly supportive person. The class was themed around horror movies, so he would organize after-hour watch parties for us to watch the film we would be studying. He would bake us something utterly delicious at every watch party and conduct exciting discussions afterward. The event was so popular that we often brought friends outside the class to watch the movies with us.

Carlos has been a valued member of the HP community and his research is helping unlock some of the biggest secrets of the universe.  We congratulate him and wish him luck during his Letson internship this summer.