#SoCaltech: Sandra O’Neill

Sandra O’Neill. Photo: Lance Hayashida

Sandra O’Neill, a fourth-year undergraduate student, co-authored a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in February 2022 that showed evidence for the tightest-knit supermassive black hole duo observed to date. O’Neill began college as a chemistry major and had planned to work with Brian M. Stoltz, the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry, as part of Caltech’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program in 2020. Due to COVID, that project fell through, but she picked up the astronomy project to stay active during the pandemic and began working with Anthony Readhead, Robinson Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus.

“I was supposed to work in the Stoltz Lab for my SURF after my first year, but I couldn’t. I emailed Carol Casey [associate director of student-faculty programs], and she told me, ‘We actually got an email this morning from a professor who’s looking for someone.’ I hadn’t taken an astronomy class before that, and I had to suddenly learn a bunch of things really quickly. Everyone in Professor Readhead’s lab did an excellent job of guiding me. It could have been easy for me to just get through that first project and then go back to chemistry. This has definitely certified that I want to go into physics or astrophysics.

“I like it because it’s similar to something like archeology in that both are quite messy fields. You can do your best to study an isolated system, or something that you pull out of the ground, but there are so many confounding variables that it’s hard to understand the exact origins and the relevance. Here, we’re also dealing with the past as it’s coming to us and trying to understand the universe around us as it tells us about itself.”

#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.