Ok, I admit it, there's no good reason for this picture of Doctor Doom to be here but come on, he's a scientist, I'm a scientist, work with me. I'm presently working towards my PhD in Astronomy at Princeton University. This is now my third year. I am now working on my thesis project with Ed Turner. It involves looking for gravitationally-lensed quasars in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey .
Quasars are extremely distant and luminous objects.
Gravitational lensing is an effect produced when a strong gravitational field causes light to bend. It turns out that by studying gravitationally-lensed quasars we can learn a great deal about the fundamental properties of our universe. However, very few of these objects have ever been found. We hope that by searching the unprecedented data set produced by the SDSS, we will be able to find more of these rare objects. A paper based upon this work has now been submitted for publication.