MIT Kavli Institute Directory

Sarah N. Trowbridge Heine

Graduate Student, Physics Student

Affiliations:MIT Department of Physics, MIT Kavli Institute

I am a native of Boulder, Colorado and got my undergraduate in physics from MIT in 2008. As an undergraduate I competed on the varsity gymnastics team at MIT and now coach the team, which has since become a club, along with my husband who is also an MIT varsity gymnastics alum. My other interests include playing violin, crocheting and other crafts and baking.

Research interests:

I work on both science and instrumentation. I am a member of the Figueroa group currently developing and building the Micro-X rocket payload that will observe a supernova remnant with unprecedented energy resolution in the soft X-ray band. Micro-X is a novel system that will drive the technology for X-ray spectroscopy of extended sources forward, looking toward detector systems for the next generation of large X-ray observatories. My science interests lie in observations of supernova remnants, especially using spectral information to try to understand explosion dynamics and products. Currently we use data from existing X-ray observatories like Chandra and Suzaku to study these sources and once Micro-X flies we will have and exciting and novel dataset with which to study these sources.

Representative publications:

"A Decade-Baseline Study of the Plasma States of the Ejecta Knots in Cassiopeia A", Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano, John Rutherford, Sarah Trowbridge, Daniel Dewey, Fabienne A. Bastien, Kosuke Sato and C.R. Canizares, in prep.
"Tracking the Orbital and Superorbital Periods of SMC X-1", Sarah Trowbridge, Michael A. Nowak, and Joern Wilms, ApJ 670 No 1 (2007 November 20) 624-634.

Honors and awards:

Whiteman fellowship 2008 Harriet Jenkin's Predoctoral Fellowship 2010-2013