For the second year in a row, a student at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) was chosen for the highly selective national Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Posters on the Hill (POTH).
One of just 60 chosen nationally, "Characterizing the TGF-Lightning Relationship Using ENTLN," is the title of the research poster by Kareem Omar, a sophomore Honors student who is a double major in physics and aerospace engineering with a 4.0 grade point average. The 19th annual session of POTH was held recently in Washington, D.C.
Omar also participated in the 2015 Research Horizons Poster Session and the Elevator Pitch Sharing Session during UAH Research Week and was selected for the UAH Research & Creative Experience for Undergraduates (RCEU) program this summer.
"I was impressed that Alabama received two spots in this year's Posters on the Hill program, beating out hundreds of candidates from all over the country," he says. "I was honored to be one of them and to represent UAH, Huntsville, the UA system and Alabama in Washington."
Omar's research explores a different way of localizing terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) - bursts of gamma rays related to lightning activity on Earth.
UAH is an amazing place for this kind of research, and I truly hope to see more and more students getting involved.
Kareem Omar
UAH sophomore
"They can travel into space and be detected but not precisely localized by the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) instrument onboard NASA's Fermi Space Telescope," says Omar. "My work used a different approach to localize TGFs, correlating ground-based radio detections from the Earth Networks Total Lightning Network (ENTLN) radio lightning detector network with GBM TGF detections - corrected for travel time - thus allowing analysis of surrounding lightning activity and gaining us understanding of the TGF generation process."
His poster was displayed at an evening reception event in the Rayburn Cafeteria of the Rayburn House Office Building and was viewed by lawmakers, staffers and federal employees. Winners of the competition spent two days in Washington advocating for undergraduate research, celebrating and raising awareness of research conducted by undergraduate students nationwide.
Winners also scheduled meetings with their representatives from their home district and from the district in which they go to school to share their work, explain the importance of undergraduate research and advocate for federal agencies that catalyze student research, including public universities.
"In my particular experience with the program, my advisor and I personally met with three congressmen, two of whom were on the House Science Committee," says Omar. "We also met with the staffs of three senators, two from Alabama and one from my home state of Kentucky.