At Princeton, research does not always look the way people imagine. It is not always telescopes pointed toward the sky or chalkboards filled with equations. Sometimes, it happens in quiet laboratories where the goal is to understand things you cannot even see, like streams of charged particles moving through space.
For Rishika Porandla, a member of the Class of 2028 majoring in astrophysics, this is exactly where her work lives. Her research sits at the intersection of space, plasma, and the instruments that allow scientists to study both.