Although she had always been fascinated by the stars in the night sky, it wasn’t until Madyson Barber was a senior in high school that she got her first taste of the science behind the cosmos.
“We did one tiny unit on astrophysics, and I really loved it, and it took off from there,” says Barber, now a rising senior at Carolina. “We just touched on one thing I could learn about space, and it caused me to have so many more questions. So, I knew I wanted to dive deeper into that subject.”
Looking for the answers to her questions led her to UNC-Chapel Hill to study astrophysics in the College of Arts & Sciences and then to assistant professor Andrew Mann’s lab to research exoplanets — planets outside of our solar system.