Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Prize 2020 recipient is Virginia Tech doctoral student Rebekah Pestes.
Pestes majored in biophysics and math as an undergraduate student at Walla Walla University. While there, she worked with Roy Campbell on research in protein folding. Having discovered a preference for using math to describe how things worked over the intense memorization required for biology, Pestes’ research eventually focused on neutrino physics with Patrick Huber while pursuing her PhD in physics at Virginia Tech. Currently, she is working with Peter Denton in the Science Graduate Student Research Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory.