#SoCaltech: Kathryn Plant

"I'm interested in cosmic rays because their origins are a mystery. We don't even know if these cosmic rays come from inside or outside our Milky Way galaxy at the energies I study. These are high-energy particles of matter that stream to us from outer space at energies beyond what we can study in a lab and shape how galaxies evolve.

For my PhD thesis, I built an experiment at [Caltech's] Owens Valley Radio Observatory to make these very-difficult-to-observe particles tangible. The experiment is part of the Long Wavelength Array, a collection of 352 pyramid-shaped antennas at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. The Long Wavelength Array studies exoplanet space weather, the Sun, the early universe, and more. While I was at Caltech, we upgraded the array, and this made it possible for me to build a new way to use the array to detect cosmic rays. 

Spending time at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory building the cosmic ray detection system was one of the best parts of my PhD. I like building things, and Owens Valley is very special because there aren't a lot of places like it where a grad student can have a responsibility of this scale in a project. And the people I worked with there are incredible to learn from. It's also kind of amazing that one can travel a few hours from Los Angeles and be at a radio observatory in the middle of a desert surrounded by beautiful mountains."

Kathryn Plant (PhD '23) is a radio astronomer and astroparticle physicist who works as a postdoctoral scholar at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech. She recently won the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics for her PhD thesis work on cosmic rays.

#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.