The Sky Isn’t the Limit for Undergraduates

May 7, 2025 by ljudy

Javier Gómez Marchant was surrounded by a passion for science during his childhood in Santiago, Chile, and YouTube videos drew his interest to astronomy. Undergraduate research opportunities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, cemented his interest in a career seeking to better understand the cosmos.

He is graduating with a BS in physics and preparing to enter graduate school. Gómez will pursue a PhD in theoretical astrophysics at Rutgers University, developing models to better understand and predict astronomical phenomena, or looking further as a cosmologist into the early universe.

He already was looking toward the sky in Chile, where observational astronomy research has been growing because of the clear night skies. He met and talked with astronomers through the connections of his parents. His mother worked at the Planetarium of the University of Santiago of Chile, and his father, Claudio Gómez, was director of the National Museum of Natural History of Chile.

In 2019, Claudio became the new executive director of UT’s McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture, and his son, Javier, started his junior year of high school at L&N STEM Academy in Knoxville.

Research, Internship Opportunities

“I was really focused on my academics for the first two years of being in UT,” Javier Gómez said. While researching graduate school options he learned that research experience and having a scientific publication with his name on it would make his applications more competitive.

In UT’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, he first joined the research group of Assistant Professor Sherwood Richers, which is studying neutrinos, one of the fundamental particles of the universe. “As theoretical astrophysicists, we are trying to make simulations of neutrino quantum kinetics to better understand the properties of neutrinos and how they can affect larger systems,” Gómez explained.

Gómez was a co-author on a Richers paper in the journal Physical Review D about testing a machine learning model and other analytical models to study quantum mechanical neutrino instabilities in a neutron star merger simulation.

“They (Richers and his collaborators) wanted to investigate different approximations and to calculate the result of neutrino quantum kinetics in a larger simulation of a collision of two neutron stars,” he said.

“Javier dove into research both with myself and with (Professor) Raph Hix, and very quickly managed to automate running many simulations of neutrino quantum kinetics,” Richers said.

For 10 weeks during the summer before his senior year—and when his schedule has allowed since— Gómez worked with Hix, who is both a professor in UT’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and leader of the Theoretical and Computational Physics Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

“My task was analyzing an early attempt to create a 3-D simulation of a supernova, because up to now it has been difficult to do simulations of a core-collapse supernova for more than two dimensions,” Gómez said. The simulations run for hundreds to thousands of hours on a supercomputer.

“I was analyzing and creating all of the code necessary to do the analysis of the supernova. That experience was really, really enriching,” he said. “In this project, I was given this extremely large simulation with thousands and thousands and thousands of data points. Then my task was being the person who had to do the things needed to actually analyze it. I got a lot of coding experience, and that was really useful.”

It was his first time working a full-time job as a researcher, and he had an opportunity to take a course through ORNL on coding.

The more research he was involved in, the more Gómez realized how much he likes the work. “You can find the origins of how things work on the largest scale imaginable,” he said. “It’s a really fun process, because there’s so much stuff in the universe that we wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for these core-collapse supernovae, like all of the elements above iron wouldn’t be as abundant if it wasn’t because of that.”

Engaged Learning

In a required physics course on mechanics, he appreciated Assistant Professor Lawrence Lee, who has earned recognition for both his teaching and innovative research. “What was so interesting about this class was how this professor was so good at communicating so much with so little time,” Gómez said. “He would communicate so many important ideas and do so many derivations of physics equations.”

In his final semester Gómez also was enjoying a general relativity course, during which Richers uses a flipped classroom style. Watching lectures before class allows students to pause and think about the content. “In class we’re doing active thinking and problem solving,” Gómez said.

One of his favorite classes at UT was Food, Fiction, and Film in Modern Japan. “It was really fun and entertaining and insightful,” he said, watching and discussing films and learning about the history of Japan through the types of food eaten over time.

Community Service

This spring Gómez was honored by the UT Provost as a Volunteer of Distinction, an award given to students with extraordinary academic achievement, community engagement, or excellence in research.

In addition to balancing coursework and research, Gómez has devoted time to helping at-risk people in Knoxville.

After his first year at UT, he became involved with an organization that distributes resources such as food, clothing, and first aid kits to unhoused people. “It has been a great opportunity for me and has helped me grow a lot, especially socially, interacting with people from the US, and also having a community that supports me and friends who have similar values,” he said.

Gómez also uses his baking skills to contribute to community meals every week. He loves Chilean baking and recreates foods he misses from home, such as alfajores, cookies that are filled with what he describes as “a really, really, decadent milk caramel.”

“He makes amazing alfajores,” Richers said.

By Amy Beth Miller