Lena Komarova is a rising junior at Smith College. This summer, she will work on ram pressure stripping of star-forming regions in the Virgo cluster galaxies. Lena has worked on the project Modelling Scalar Fields in Inflationary Models of the Early Universe and has served as a learning and teaching assistant for introductory physics and astronomy classes. She is active in the Smith College Physics Club and Smith College Russian Club and enjoys reading Russian literature. Taking an astronomy class during her first year of college out of curiosity, Lena was fascinated by the material and decided to major in it. For her, astronomy symbolizes the centuries of humanity’s work to understand the universe and find its place in it. She is looking forward to work with astronomical data, a change in pace from the research in theoretical physics that she has been doing. She is excited to experience Yale’s libraries.
