Sam Imperato

Planetarium

I worked as a Planetarium Astronomy at the Royal Observatory Greenwich for 2 years, where I made and presented planetarium shows to various audiences. I utilized planetarium software like Dark Matter and Blender to create scientifically accurate and immersive visualizations.

White Dwarfs

I spent a year at Boston University, where I performed research in Prof. JJ Hermes BU White Dwarfs research group. I studied the oscillations inside of white dwarfs, which cause pulsations on their surface, as well as writing code to help out with various projects in the group.

Low Mass X-Ray Binaries

As an undergraduate student, I worked on a project aiming to constrain the natal kicks on black holes in low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) by modeling the evolutionary history of observed LMXBs. I use a combination of population synthesis, a detailed stellar structure and evolution code, and analytic treatments to reconstruct the history of the binaries. This work was completed in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's group.

After I graduated, the study was completed by Chase Kimball, a Northwestern PhD candidate. The paper can be accessed here https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023ApJ...952L..34K/abstract

Continuous Gravitational Waves

In Summer 2021, I worked at the Sapienza University of Rome as part of the International REU Program in Gravitational Physics, where I assessed a new method for follow-up on continuous gravitational wave candidate signals. The resulting paper can be read on the UF IREU site http://www.phys.ufl.edu/ireu/IREU2021/pdf_reports/SamImperato_Roma_IREU2021.pdf.

Coursework Projects

In my undergraduate coursework, I've completed relevant projects in computational physics and data science. This includes modeling the position of asteroids in the solar system due to Jupiter's gravitational pull (pictured left), using machine learning to classify astronomical objects observed by a telescope, and predicting the critical temperature of superconductors with machine learning.