Asking and answering the biggest, most challenging questions doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires ever-better training, input, and ideas—things that only happen when we learn from and with other creative minds. At CCAPP, faculty push each other toward new levels of understanding and insight, and we do the same with junior scientists.
At CCAPP, we want our students and postdocs to be great. Our faculty teach more than just information; they guide the next generation to ponder things like dark energy and active galaxies with a scientist’s mind, and to be successful in their own unique style.
CCAPP’s junior researchers train with faculty one-on-one at the front lines of cosmology and astrophysics research, learning different approaches and techniques from a variety of thinkers and mentors. In an environment where astronomers and physicists work side by side, grad students are encouraged to work with different people on different projects, and the entire faculty participates in providing guidance to postdocs.
Our level of collaboration among junior and senior scientists is important, because just as addressing the universe’s biggest unknowns requires both astronomers and physicists, the biggest questions in all of science call for both expert and beginner minds—ones that know the facts and others that approach them unhindered by “the right way.” While great scientists cultivate both mindsets in themselves, the perspectives that junior researchers bring to the journey are invaluable.
Students and postdocs represent the future of knowledge, and at CCAPP their participation in science starts now.