Shengkai (Alwin) Mao : Goldwater Scholarship
Alwin is majoring in Astrophysics and will be a senior in fall 2015. He hopes to attain a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and perform research and teach at the university level. He has made the Dean’s Honors list twice. Alwin has been a research assistant with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, studying tidal disruption in dwarf spheroidal galaxies around the Milky Way, and with North Carolina State University, where he adapted VH-1 to simulate and evolve models of 1.4 solar mass Type la Supernovae and developed a code to determine a geometric center of the supernova remnant and how spherical the supernova was. He is passionate about studying the cusps and cores of dark matter, and hopes to continue research to either defend or redefine current understandings of dark matter.