Jasmine Elmrabti, VRG 2021 Scholarship Winner Update
I am studying physics and mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, minoring in Middle Eastern languages. I do physics research primarily modeling and analyzing many-body electronic systems in biological settings with quantum mechanics and computational chemistry. This year, I celebrate my sixth year of veganism. Though physics may seem detached from liberation theory, including the non-violence and sustainability central to veganism, these concepts are intertwined and thus fundamental to my work. I focus on this in my research and daily life from philosophical and humanistic perspectives.
A while ago, the Principal Investigator (PI) of my laboratory, Dr. Philip Kurian, asked me to define life. My answer began: What motivates the quest for a definition of life should inform how that definition is arrived to. Rooted in anthropocentric pursuits and bounded by moral considerations, human conception of life becomes a problem parameterized by survival and sanctity. We navigate the tension between the imperative to survive and the moral obligation to preserve life, particularly sentient beings. This definition can extend to consider the extension of survival and sanctity even to the smallest units of matter. Life can be human, animal, bacterium, quanta—it depends why one asks. Certainly, if I could, I would advocate for lepton rights as I do sentient beings’ rights and oppose violations of either. To do this, we must first determine exactly what is a lepton and how this elementary particle, in a given system, might behave when observed. I think there are deep ideological consequences from using physics to characterize the hot and wet systems of soft matter.
Outside of my studies, I spend my time helping lead our campus Society of Physics Students (SPS), where I started the department’s first free tutoring program targeting K-12 students in Orange County. I hope to instill in others similar philosophical understandings of math and physics to cultivate empathetic and liberatory mindsets. I also hope to convey that research in physics, trying to discover ways things work, is not so different from philosophies of non-violence and animal liberation; it requires creativity, thinking about different observers, and using reason to determine solutions to worldly problems.
Here is information about Jasmine’s high school work when she applied for the scholarship.
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