About Me
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As you know, my name is Emily. I was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in the early 80s. I lived with my parents in our hometown of Guayanilla for most of my life. I went to elementary and middle school in a private catholic school in Guayanilla (ten long years in catholic school), and then I went to the public high school in the same town. I graduated high school in May 1999 and then went off to college to the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. I was a Physics Major in UPR-Mayagüez from 1999 until I graduated in 2003. During those four years I spent my summers doing internships at NIST, Harvard-CfA, and NASA/Goddard.
In mid-2003 I moved to State College, right smack-dab in the middle of Pennsylvania, where I would be starting graduate school in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at Penn State University. In the summer of 2006 I moved to Maryland to live close to NASA/GSFC, where I am currently a coop student (while still being a Penn State grad student), doing my thesis research on black hole mergers as probes of structure formation, under the supervision of Cole Miller (UMD), Joan Centrella (Goddard) and Steinn Sigurðsson (Penn State). When I was still in Penn State, I met my beloved John Wise, with whom I've shared the happiest 4+ years of my life. He's now a postdoc in Goddard, which makes me very happy because we're finally living together (our little family consists of me, him, and two kitties) after many years of long distance while he was a grad student in Stanford. John and I got engaged on 15 May 2008, and we plan on getting married around February or March 2010 (after I have graduated and my braces have come off).
I like many things. I like astronomy (duh), though more specifically cosmology, black holes and stars. I also like various topics in physics (nuclear physics, particles and strings, etc), and math (though I used to be better at math than I am currently). I also love hearing and telling nerdy science jokes. Another thing I love is watching TV. I have many favorite shows, some of which are animated (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Death Note, Cardcaptor Sakura, Futurama, The Simpsons) and others are not (Friends, Frasier, Scrubs, Sex and the City, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, How It's Made, etc). I used to have a mild 'addiction' to reading blogs, but now I have it under control (though I still read some blogs on politics, feminism, science and technology). I also love playing video games, especially on my Nintendo DS and Wii (anything with Mario in it!), but also some PS2 games such as the Katamari Damacy series. I like learning (or at least attempting to learn) foreign languages such as Japanese, Polish, Serbian, Italian, etc... though I've never become fluent in anything other than English and Spanish. I also enjoy riding rollercoasters, eating pizza, listening to music, and reading anything and everything I can get my hands on... And recently I've taken a liking to cats, particularly due to my fiance's two cute kitties, Sampson and Jeremy.
And obviously, there are many things that I don't like. I absolutely hate being called "Ms Muñoz", because that is not my name. I'm completely phobic of bees and wasps, and I'm not a big fan of insects in general either. I hate migraines with a passion, seeing as I've suffered from them my entire life. I don't like spicy foods, and my stomach doesn't like them either. And I hate hate hate getting shocked whenever I touch something metal because of all the static electricity caused by dry winter air. Though I don't like high humidity either, go fig.
Oh, and here are a few random pictures of me. Mouse-over for description, and click to embiggen...
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Last Updated: 1 August 2008
