Visgaitis Awarded Gold Chambliss Medal at Kutztown University

Tiffany Visgaitis, a senior physics and astronomy major from Whitehall, Pa., has been awarded the Gold Chambliss Student Academic Achievement Award in the category of successfully completed research projects. Tiffany used the on-campus observatory telescope to co-discover two new exoplanets as well as co-authoring two peer reviewed professional publications detailing the discoveries. Tiffany also attended a conference where she presented her research and participated in workshops intended for graduate students. She also recently traveled to Italy where she worked on a computer code used in exoplanet discovery and presented the work she did there at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Her work on exoplanet detection has been ongoing for three years now since spring of 2015. She has been on the Dean's List every semester since fall 2015, received the KU College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean's Scholar Award in spring 2016, and is the recipient of the Deborah A. James Women in Physics Scholarship for the 2017-2018 school year. In the future, Tiffany plans to attend graduate school and earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics and has already been offered a position in the Case Western Reserve University program.