Jooyun Woo came to Bloomington with her husband, who was accepted into IUB, and decided that she wanted to study physics. However she was unable to afford IU tuition and formally enroll in physics classes. This circumstance would deter the great majority of students from pursuing undergraduate work in physics. Not Jooyun.
With the agreement of the relevant class instructors, she decided to audit all of the upper-level physics undergraduate classes required for an IUB physics undergraduate BS degree and create her own documentation of her class performance in the absence of a formal degree from IUB. After some summer research work at the Center for Axion and Precision Physics (CAPP) in Daejon, Such Korea, and with coauthorship in a scientific publication on neutron searches for exotic gravity, Jooyun was accepted into the physics PhD program at Columbia.
Jooyun successfully defended her PhD thesis at Columbia in February 2025, entitled “X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Observation of Galactic PeVatrons”. Jooyun will continue to work at Columbia as a postdoc on the IAXO axion helioscope experiment.
The College of Arts