SPS Internship Program Takes Paige Nolan to the Cosmos
Paige Nolan spent her summer in Washington, DC, for the SPS summer internship program. The rising junior at the University of Maryland, College Park is a double major in physics and astronomy, and her internship placement at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) provided her with a first glimpse into what scientific research is really about.
“I was always a very curious child. I was very interested in how things worked and why things worked the way they did,” Nolan said. “I feel like there’s a lot out there that we don’t know about.”
Paige Nolan photographed with the Baltimore skyline, where the SPS summer interns had dinner with the AIP Board of Directors. Courtesy of Paige Nolan.
Courtesy of Paige Nolan.
The Space Telescope Science Institute.
Courtesy of Paige Nolan.
NGC 625, the galaxy Nolan studied during her internship, as imaged by the Legacy Surveys Sky Viewer.
Credit: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute), NERSC
The internship program places physics undergraduates into assignments that fit their career goals — from science writing at Physics Today, to policy at the National Institutes of Science and Technology, to outreach at the American Association of Physics Teachers.
Nolan was matched with one of SPS’s research-based internships. Working with Nimisha Kumari at STScI, she spent 10 weeks among the stars, immersed in galactic astronomy.
“What we were doing was looking at local analogues of high-redshifted galaxies and determining characteristics of these local analogues, which can tell us about what these high-redshifted galaxies might look like,” Nolan said.
Her research specifically focused on NGC 625, a nearby blue compact dwarf galaxy characterized by its small size, irregular shape, low metallicity, and high star formation rate. Using combinations of optical and spectroscopic measurements, Nolan and Kumari aimed to understand the chemistry of NGC 625.
To Nolan, the opportunity to work with such a big name in astronomy at STScI provided an invaluable peek into the life of a researcher — and maybe her first peer-reviewed publication, as she continues to work alongside Kumari through the next academic year.
“I only had experience with research in a classroom setting, so it was cool that I finally got to step foot into that research world,” she said. “It’s exciting to work with all of these new kinds of data and learn about all of these different techniques.”
Though Nolan does not yet know where she hopes her physics and astronomy studies will take her, she says the networking and connections her SPS internship provided will be useful regardless of whether she stays in academia and research.
“It opened up a lot of opportunities to meet people in all different fields of physics,” she said. “It gave me an idea of all the different things you can do with a physics degree, and all of these new connections can lead to new opportunities.”
Applications for the 2027 SPS internship program are currently open through January 15, 2027.
