Brina Martinez

"I wanted to be a teacher. I even considered getting a license to teach while getting my bachelors in physics, but ultimately did not go on that path because I wanted to do research first. Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez is the reason I chose to pursue LIGO research. I met her at a conference after finding out her undergraduate advisor was my current advisor. I had never heard of LIGO or gravitational waves, and when I got to meet her and see what LIGO does I instantly knew it was something I wanted to do. The reason I chose to study physics in the first place was because of my high school physics teacher who was also a woman. She worked at NASA before becoming a teacher. I think I pushed forward in physics and research because of the inspirational women I came across. I also enjoyed the never-ending challenges physics offered since normally I would struggle with boredom in my other classes due to how easy I found them. I was really good at math and the fact I got to use math -- especially beautiful equations within physics to explain why and how things work -- opened a whole new perspective to me. With physics, there’s always something to be predicted, answered, or disproved and someone needs to do those things, so I decided that person would be me. "

Brina Martinez is a senior undergraduate student and researcher at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Brina mostly works on characterizing the noise in LIGO detectors. Her previous work includes characterizing thunderstorm noise to investigate its relationship with scattered light in the beam tubes, creating and testing new veto methods for the PyCBC search pipeline to be used as a data quality tool and performing data quality shifts. When she was able to be on campus for college, she would go to the gym in her free time to practice mixed martial arts. But during quarantine, Brina instead enjoys watching anime and Korean dramas and reading books of all genres. She recently adopted a puppy and named it after her favorite anime character Kenma since both are very shy and have the same color hair. You can follow Brina on Twitter at @_brinamartinez.