Undergraduate Research

Congratulations to the December Undergraduate Researcher of the Month, Valentina Bonilla! 

Valentina Bonilla is a Hicks Honors College student majoring in Physics with a concentration in Astrophysics and a minor in Mathematics. Since her first semester at UNF, she has been engaged in astrophysics research under the mentorship of Dr. Marina Kounkel and Dr. Joseph Mullen in the UNF Department of Physics.

Throughout her undergraduate career, Valentina has had the opportunity to contribute to 3 major research projects. Her first project focused on building a neural network capable of classifying young stars only by their near-infrared spectra, later expanding into a detailed spectroscopic analysis that led to the creation of empirical templates for traditional classification methods. This work is currently being prepared for publication and has been presented at several conferences on and off the UNF campus, including the American Astronomical Society Meeting, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) Collaboration Meeting, the 2024 Advancements in Research, Inquiry, and Scholarship Exhibition (ARISE), the 2024 Undergraduate – Graduate Learning, Inquiry, and Distinctive Experimentation (U-GLIDE) Symposium, and the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics. This past summer, she also participated in the Chalmers Astrophysics and Space Sciences Summer Fellowship in Gothenburg, Sweden, where she analyzed the massive young star population of the Vela C Giant Molecular Cloud — research she will present at the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) Meeting in January and at the 2026 Florida Undergraduate Research Conference (FURC) in March. Her most recent project focuses on deriving orbital and stellar parameters for candidate Eclipsing Binaries and examining how orbital eccentricity evolves with age.

When reflecting on her favorite aspects of research, Valentina shares that she loves proving to herself that she can always learn something new. She especially values the process of developing new skills — such as having no prior experience with coding to becoming proficient in multiple programming languages within just 2 years. Her deep fascination with the cosmos also motivates her and set her on this career path, as she finds joy in uncovering how stars, galaxies, and other celestial systems truly work.

After graduating in May 2027, Valentina plans to pursue a PhD in Astrophysics and become a professor or a researcher at a national laboratory. Her advice to current and aspiring researchers is: “Don’t be afraid of not ‘knowing enough’ to join a research project. Working on research is not about having all the answers — it’s about learning, gaining new skills, and asking questions when you’re unsure. No one is expecting you to be a professional out of the gate, and just putting yourself out there and gaining these experiences will set you apart from your peers in many ways.”