Dustin Swarm, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is part of the 2025 Dare to Discover banner campaign, showcasing 80 undergraduate, graduate student, and postdoctoral scholars engaged in promising research, scholarship, and creative activities.

The banners, the tenth installment of the campaign sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research, will be up in downtown Iowa City until March. Advisors and colleagues nominated the students and postdocs, whose profiles can be found at dare.research.uiowa.edu. 

Working with faculty mentor Casey DeRoo, Swarm is a high-energy astrophysicist who studies the extreme conditions of the universe: hot gas, massive stars, explosive events, and extreme gravitational and magnetic fields. Swarm is designing telescope mirrors that will focus light from positrons in our galaxy. Positrons are electrons with a positive charge, which produce light when they collide with an electron. Because these collisions are incredibly energetic, conventional telescopes are unable to focus the light they produce. Swarm’s research would enable telescopes potentially to see this energy, allowing researchers to explore what makes these positrons.

Swarm’s goal is to become an astronomy professor at a research-focused university, which would allow him to deepen and expand his research while mentoring and training the next generation of space scientists.