POSTDOC
Princeton University
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows Program

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Dr. Frye
Prior to joining Princeton in the fall of 2001 as a Council Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow and a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Brenda Frye spent two years working with Dr. Saul Permutter as a Postdoc with the Supernova Cosmology Project group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She received her Ph. D. in Astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. For her thesis work, supported in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, she worked with Professors Hy Spinrad and Tom Broadhurst on measuring the magnification produced by massive lensing galaxy clusters. Clusters magnify the light from the hundreds of individual galaxies behind them into distorted images called arclets. The shapes of the arclets in turn map out the cluster's gravitational potential, much like iron filings trace out the magnetic field lines of a dipole magnet. Measuring the image distortion and magnification allows for a complete description of the total underlying mass. The results yield a mass profile which departs strongly from a pure isothermal halo, and is more consistent with the flatter profiles coming out of recent N-body simulations. She is continuing this research here, as well as branching out into other areas of observational cosmology.

She developed her motivation for doing observational cosmology at the University of Arizona, where she worked with Professors Fred Chaffee and Jill Bechtold on the properties and use of Quasi-Stellar Objects, and received double degrees in Physics and Astronomy in 1992. She also enjoys teaching, having had the opportunity to head the main Astronomy course at UC Berkeley in the summer of 2000, and, together with Professor Jill Knapp, to teach the Freshman Seminar at Princeton in the fall of 2001 on the Search for Planets and for Life in the Universe. Formerly a competitive gymnast, her hobbies include travelling, dancing, and keeping her knees in working order.