User:MagLabCarlos/Keilah Davis

Keilah Davis is an NSF Graduate Researcher Fellow. She is currently a PhD student at Louisiana State University working in experimental nuclear astrophysics. She is currently focusing on developing techniques for explosive astrophysical processes.

Early Life & Education

Davis grew up Durham, North Carolina and attended North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics for high school. It was there that she took her first physics class. After graduation, she enrolled in North Carolina State University. During that time, she conducted research in nuclear physics with Dr. Richard Longland in developing methods to statistically determine reaction cross sections given the error in optical parameters of DWBA models. Additionally, she co-developed software to implement a digitizer into an existing data acquisition system and created a custom graphical user interface. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from NC State with a degree in Physics and minors in Africana Studies and Mathematics. Davis is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Physics at Louisiana State University, with Professor Catherine Deibel. What is her dissertation about?

Organizations

Nubian Message newspaper stand on the campus of NC State.

Davis was involved with the Nubian Message, which is a student newspaper at NC State. The sentinel of the African American community at NC State since 1992, the Nubian Message is a bimonthly student-run newspaper. She started as a staff writer in 2016 where she wrote news, features, and opinion columns bi-weekly. She spent the following year as managing editor, during which the Nubian Message celebrated its 25th anniversary. That same year, the Nubian Message won Best of Show at the North Carolina College Media Association Conference (2018). In April 2018 she was promoted to Editor in Chief, As Editor-in-Chief, she lead the staff in producing journalism while further discovering the paper's identity as an alternative publication.

Selected publications

• A Statistical Method for Determining Stellar Reaction Cross Sections
• A Study of the Low-Lying States of ⁹B with a Super-Enge Split-Pole Spectrograph (SE-SPS) and the Silicon Array for Branching Ratio Experiments (SABRE)
• Measurement of near-threshold proton branching ratios in ³¹S using ²⁸Si(⁶Li,t)³¹S(p)³⁰P
• The Focal-plane Detector Package at the TUNL Split-pole Spectrograph (de-link and change into a citation)

Honors & Awards

• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (2021-Present)
• LS-LAMP Bridge to the Doctorate Fellowship (2019-2020)
• Yusor Abu-Salha Senior Award for Outstanding Community Engagement, NC State (2019)
• Patty Award for Leadership, Physics Department, NC State (2019)