#122 - Isobel Romero-Shaw: Gravitational Waves

Storytellers of STEMM

Today's storyteller is Isobel Romero-Shaw! Isobel is a PhD student at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She studies gravitational waves, which is AWESOME. I'm not even going to pretend to be smart enough to write out an explanation of what that is so just listen in and Isobel will explain it to us. What I will say is that the existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Albert Einstein, and recently confirmed just a few years ago. There's still so much to learn in this field! Today Isobel tells us how she stubbornly chose physics, and about her research with gravitational waves. And then we jump into a dive about Homeward Bound - I'm HB5 as you all know and Isobel is HB6. It was really great getting to talk to her and I'm happy to have met another person from HB6, so enjoy!

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You can find Rachel Villani on Twitter @flyingcypress and Storytellers of STEMM on Facebook and on the shiny new Twitter account @storytellers42.

You can find Isobel on Twitter @astrobel_rs and her HB6 fundraising website. Isobel's book is Planetymology!

LIGO is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/. The LIGO facility in Louisiana I reference is the Livingston one.

Book List: Storm in a Teacup by Helen Czerski, The Art Instinct by Dennis Dutton, The Trial by Franz Kafka, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Episodes referenced in this episode: "my friend Tim" is Tim Spruill (Episode 8), Harriet Teare (Episode 121)

You can find Homeward Bound at their website https://homewardboundprojects.com.au/, on Twitter @HomewardBound16, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/homewardboundprojects.

Recorded on 20 March 2021.