Evan Trommer — the URECA Researcher of the Month for September — is a senior majoring in physics and mathematics who has been exploring experimental plasma physics under the mentorship of Navid Vafaei-Najafabadi from the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He participated in the 2022 URECA summer program and presented a poster on “Probing the Electromagnetic Field Structure in Plasma Wakefields Using Relativistic Electrons” at the Summer Symposium on August 4. Trommer’s research project built on his extensive programming skills and his combined academic training in physics and mathematics, and has since led to analytical and numerical simulations that will soon be tested at the Accelerator Test Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
On campus, he has been active in the Society of Physics Students as deputy secretary and currently as president of the club. He plans to pursue graduate studies in physics.
Trommer describes how his research combined his academic interests and built on an “approach that I really learned from my math classes about how to find an equation, or how to simplify something to get an equation into a reasonable form for us to look at … So my research ended up drawing upon both my physics classes and previous math classes and sort of tied them together in a nice bow; it allowed me to take what I learned, along with some computational skills, in class and outside of class to actually put it all together.”
Trommer is a graduate of West Islip High School where he was first engaged in a research project on solar panels.
Read the interview with URECA Director Karen Kernan.
Good for him. The Society of Physics Students Cafe during the first Friday of classes was fun event