The George Ellery Hale Fellowships, created by the University of Colorado Boulder in partnership with NSF's National Solar Observatory, include every year a two-year postdoctoral fellowship and a three-year graduate fellowship. It also includes a three-year visiting faculty position. CU Boulder originally designed the program to give students the freedom to explore a mix of solar and space physics research paths.

"To create an environment within which HALE graduate fellows can thrive, they are encouraged to pursue research with multiple mentors before deciding on a thesis project," says CU physics professor Mark Rast.

"The Hale allows students to define the direction of their research. Typically, graduate student research is defined by the grant supporting the student. Hale Fellowships allow students to investigate possibilities that lie outside of those restrictions. To help the students explore possibilities, we offer research rotations that are approximately half-a-semester long," Rast explained.

The Hale graduate program acts as the glue between a federally funded center that operates a new, transformational facility like the NSF's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and the younger generation of students with interest in astronomy, says Valentin M. Pillet, director of the NSO.

"This connection between a federal research center and the university ensures a healthy pool of early career scientists familiarized with the science and the data from the Inouye," he says.

Recently, Hale Fellows took an opportunity to show off their research and the importance of the fellowship with NSO's AURA Board. AURA, or the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, is a consortium of 49 US institutions and 3 international affiliates. Founded in 1957, the organization manages world-class astronomical centers for the NSF and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

For current Hale Fellow Cole Tamburri, a fourth-year PhD candidate under CU professors and NSO scientists, Maria Kazachenko and Adam Kowalski, the opportunity to be funded independently bridges the gap between solar and stellar flare physics topics that otherwise may not have been studied.

"It was rewarding to find a project within which I had the space to use my own imagination, encouraged and supported by the experience of senior scientists at CU, very early in my graduate career. This self-fulfillment is something which still drives me," he says.

Tamburri, who received his undergraduate degree in physics from Boston College, focused on ionospheric physics. Now, he studies the spatial evolution of flaring active regions. Using Inouye Solar Telescope data, he compares solar flare parameters to better understand the energy release mechanisms associated with flares.

"I knew I wanted to switch to solar physics for my graduate degree but didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. The Hale program supplied the potential to freely explore a number of subtopics in solar physics and gave me the security in my graduate career to really find out what I was interested in," he says.

Tamburri secured observing time with the Inouye Solar Telescope in 2022 through the Inouye Solar Telescope's second call for proposals.

"The experience of working with state-of-the-art data from Inouye Solar Telescope has been fast-paced, fun, and exciting, and the freedom to do so was absolutely incited by my work as a Hale Fellow," he said. "In fact, the smooth transition from Hale to Inouye Solar Telescope data as my time as a Hale fellow concluded has led to my next two years of funding through the DKIST ambassadorship program."

For Sarah Bruce, who came to the program with a degree in mathematics from the University of Texas, Austin, the most exciting part of the fellowship is being able to try out new research topics in fields that were unfamiliar.

"Since entering the program, I have worked on a K-Coronal temperatures eclipse experiment with Kevin Reardon, including data processing and instrument calibration, and also a project launching balloons in Finland with Lauren Blum to study energetic particle precipitation," said Bruce, a second-year PhD student under NSO scientist Kevin Reardon.

"In my work with spectrograph calibration, it has been interesting to see the inner workings of the instrument and understand the optics behind it, how they are built, and why they work," she said.

With a keen sense of collaboration at CU Boulder and NSO, James Crowley, a second-year PhD student, sought the opportunity to work with experts in different research areas. Over the past year, Crowley researched spectropolarimetric inversions. NSO scientists Kevin Reardon and Gianna Cauzzi helped him on projects involving the quiet Sun photosphere over the course of a solar cycle. And CU professors Don Schmidt and Cooper Downs guided projects linking photospheric magnetic fields to the corona and solar wind.

"Spectropolarimetric inversions really interest me because they combine observations, modeling, and coding in a really interesting way, and there's a lot of neat open questions that can be answered with them," he adds.

"This is a really exciting time to be a graduate student and young scientist in solar physics with data from the Inouye Solar Telescope, ESA's Solar Orbiter, NASA's Parker Solar Probe, and other sources of data. I'm excited to be able to use data from some of these during my time in graduate school - especially the spectropolarimetric observations from the Inouye Solar Telescope."

Related Links
National Solar Observatory
Solar Science News at SpaceDaily