KINGSTON, R.I. – Oct. 6, 2026 – Ever since she was young, Genevieve Payne has always had a deep interest in nature and understanding hidden systems and patterns within it, hoping to one day study some of the universe’s most extreme and least-understood phenomena.

This interest developed into a focus on gravitational wave and high-energy astrophysics as a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island. Now, Payne has received the prestigious 2026 Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) fellowship to further that focus. 

The fellowship program, funded exclusively by SIGHPC, is intended to increase the diversity of students pursuing graduate degrees in data science and computational science, including women as well as students from racial/ethnic backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in the computing field. SIGHPC is the first international group within a major professional society that is devoted exclusively to the needs of students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners in high-performance computing.

Payne, originally from Seattle and moved to Rhode Island two years ago, is one of only seven students globally to receive an SIGHPC fellowship award this year.

“It is truly an honor for me to receive the 2026 SIGHPC fellowship,” Payne said. “Earning this fellowship is very special to me, both for the support it provides as well as the chance to use it to show the relevance of astrophysics research in a field like computational sciences.”

Payne’s research work is in multi-messenger astronomy, using more than one observational source to study astronomical phenomena—specifically gravitational waves and gamma-ray bursts. Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime that allow researchers to detect highly energetic events, such as the merger of black holes and neutron stars.

This phenomena, detected for the first time in 2015, confirmed a key aspect of Einstein’s theory of relativity from 1915: that massive accelerating objects, in this case merging black holes, produce ripples in spacetime. URI researchers detected more gravitational waves in a significant study released a year ago.

Gamma-ray bursts are extremely intense flashes in the universe that are associated with the collapse of massive stars or the merger of black holes and neutron stars. These bursts can release more energy in a few seconds than the sun would emit over a 10-billion-year lifetime.

For her fellowship work, Payne is finding ways to adapt computational algorithms to extract parameters from gamma ray burst observations, with the goal of better understanding how to classify these significant extragalactic events. The more researchers learn about the dynamics of these extreme cosmic systems, the more opportunity there is to target gravitational wave follow-up searches, bringing the field closer to a complete picture of how black holes and neutron stars form, merge, and shape the universe around them, she says.

“These are extremely distant, energetic events, which are important for us to study in order to learn more about relativistic and gravitational physics. They act as huge natural laboratories that we now have the potential to observe directly,” Payne said.

Payne will be working with URI physics teaching professor Robert Coyne on her fellowship project. She says Coyne—a Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) researcher—provides a positive environment within the classroom for students to broaden their research horizons and pursue ambitious work.

“The physics department is a really wonderful community and I have felt extremely welcomed here at URI,” Payne said.

Payne plans to pursue a Ph.D. in gravitational wave science and multi-messenger astronomy after completing her master’s degree. Beyond that, she aims to pursue a career in astrophysics research with an academic or national lab team.