From
http://www.riceowls.com:
"Rice University senior Adolfo Carvalho became the fourth student-athlete in department history to earn the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship award, the organization recently announced.
The award gives grants to U.S. citizens and nationals of other countries for a variety of educational activities, primarily university lecturing, advanced research, graduate study and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as their record of service and leadership potential in their respective fields.
'This award is a reminder that at Rice, it is possible to be a championship athlete and a world class scholar,' Carvalho said. 'Rice enables and prepares us for that.'
Carvalho '20, will travel to Chile under the Fulbright Program to study protoplanetary disks, which are the gas and dust disks that surround a new-born star and are made up of material left over from the star's formation. These disks are the birthplace of planets and are studied to better understand the formation of our own solar system.
'Adolfo has been one of the most impressive people I have ever had the honor to work with," Rice men's T&F and cross country head coach Jon Warren said. "If you look at the history of this team and this department that is saying a lot. He became an outstanding runner and an integral part of both the cross country and track teams through shear hard work. He became team captain by earning the respect of his teammates and he became a leader in the athletic department by being willing and able to give his time to others. He is a very deserving recipient of this prestigious award and, I think I can speak for the entire athletic department staff when I say this, we are all extremely honored that we were able to work with him.'
An all-conference runner in cross country and a steeplechase runner in track and field, Carvalho has been enrolled in Rice's 4+1 program, adding the Professional Master in Space Studies (2020) to his Undergraduate Bachelors of Science, in Astrophysics, and Arts, in Mathematics (2019). As a Rice student, he has worked on both long term projects with the department of physics and astronomy and shorter term projects with Rice's Humanities Research Center.
Carvalho will be studying protoplanetary disks using traditional techniques, working with Astronomer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice, Andrea Isella. In addition, Carvalho will be interacting with Laura Perez from the Universidad de Chile. He will also be working with machine learning techniques used by Dr. Erzsébet Merenyi in the Rice Department of Statistics.
Chile is home to the most advanced telescopes in the world. Arguably the crown jewel of the collection of Chilean telescopes is the Atacama Large Millimeter and Sub-millimeter Array (ALMA). This telescope array operates in the radio range of the light spectrum. The radio range of the light spectrum is important to studying planet formation because it is the range where the dust and gas in the protoplanetary disks most strong emits light. This makes it easier to study structures in the disks, like empty bands in the dust, which are swept out by newly formed planets. Carvalho will be working with these radio wavelength observations to study these disk substructures and learn about the physics guiding planet formation.
Studying these disks can be challenging for traditional techniques, because the resolution of the images is sometimes insufficient to see the most minute details. A machine learning research group at Rice, headed by Dr. Erzsébet Merényi, has shown that Self-Organizing Map neural networks may be able to isolate some of these smaller structural details in the images that are missed by traditional techniques. Carvalho will be using their Neuroscope environment to train Self-Organizing Maps on the ALMA images and try to demonstrate the technique may be a promising new technique for studying protoplanetary disks in the future.
The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government's flagship international educational exchange program and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the Program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.
The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the Program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.
Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has given more than 390,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and professionals of all backgrounds and fields the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.
Fulbrighters address critical global challenges in all disciplines while building relationships, knowledge, and leadership in support of the long-term interests of the United States. Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in many fields, including 59 who have been awarded the Nobel Prize, 84 who have received Pulitzer Prizes, and 37 who have served as a head of state or government.
In the United States, the Institute of International Education supports the implementation of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, including conducting an annual competition for the scholarships."
