Erickcek '03 wins Churchill scholarship for cosmology

The very concept of physics is foreign to most four year-olds, but it was not to senior Adrienne Erickcek, who recently won a Churchill fellowship for yearlong graduate study at Cambridge University's Churchill College.

"As early as kindergarten I was saying I wanted to be a physicist," Erickcek said. "At a very young age, I got hooked on science fiction and I wanted to design a spaceship that went faster than the speed of light. I asked my father what to do and he told me to become a physicist."

Erickcek, a physics major, has since graduated from fantasy spaceships to theoretical astrophysics and cosmology, where her accomplishments have won her the Churchill fellowship.

The scholarship, established in 1959 by the Winston Churchill foundation, funds continued study for at least 11 American students a year in engineering, mathematics or the sciences. Erickcek plans to use her grant to study the math she did not take at the University.

"As a physics major I've taken lots of math classes, but physics always came first," she said. "If I have one regret it's that I haven't taken more mathematics classes while I was here. It's my chance to fix that before I move on. That's what makes this an extraordinary opportunity."

Erickcek hopes to earn a certificate of advanced study in mathematics in Churchill's department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

Although her desire to study physics came naturally, Erickcek said she was inspired by a high school teacher.

"My high school had office hours . . . and I used to come in and we would talk about popular science books I was reading at the time," Erickcek said.

The same teacher inspired her to apply to Princeton and eventually, to the Churchill Scholarship.

Similarly, the faculty in the physics department at the University has provided her with extraordinary individual attention, she said.

"I've been really lucky to have excellent independent study advisors. There's so few of us that they treat us really well," Erickcek said.

Erickcek cited her thesis advisor, physics professor Paul Steinhardt, as one of her mentors at the University. Steinhardt is overseeing Erickcek's study of the possible interaction between dark matter and baryons, or normal matter, she said.

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Following her stay in Cambridge, Erickcek will likely attend graduate school and eventually teach, she said.

"I would like to be an astrophysics professor," Erickcek said. "In physics, especially theoretical astrophysics, there's not much else you can do. I want to do research. I want to figure out what makes the universe work. It was sort of a given that I'd go into academia."

For now, Erickcek is preoccupied with choosing between the graduate schools that have agreed to defer her enrollment — among them the University of Chicago, Berkeley, Caltech and Harvard.

Erickcek spent the last two summers studying physics at CalTech and then at Harvard. She plans to take a break this summer to travel and have fun, she said.