Julie Sage

It can be difficult to keep up with senior physics major Julie Sage. She may be at UMass Lowell’s Schueller Astronomical Observatory with the Astronomy Club, helping with a public event using the observatory’s 14" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope or researching weather and light pollution’s effects on astronomical observations. 

She may be at WUML, the campus radio station, playing songs selected from the Billboard Global 200, answering science questions on air and sharing science facts related to the songs’ titles. The show also runs live on TikTok.

Or Sage might be recording a YouTube video or Instagram reel. Each episode of her various science shows, which she has been making since she was 12, has thousands of viewers. You might also find her on the Comley-Lane Theatre stage, performing in the play “One Flea Spare,” a Theatre Studies production.

She may be at the Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology (LoCSST), working on the monochromatic imager she’s developing for her capstone project. The imager will correct for wavelength shifts in astronomical observations from satellites without using thousands of filters. 

Or she might be checking up on the patent applications for one of her inventions. She was a top 10 finisher in the Xprize Next Gen Mask Challenge in 2021 and received $4,000 as part of a Significant Social Impact Award in UML’s DifferenceMaker Idea Challenge. The DifferenceMaker grant let Sage and another student create prototype kits of inventions by minority inventors that teach science, technology, engineering, arts and math concepts, as well as the inventor’s history. 

She has spent recent summers doing research at Harvard University in its 10-week astrophysics Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) internship program and working on astronomical instrumentation at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Sage’s journey to this full life at UML began when she was 6 years old and read two books on black holes that made her determined not to just explore space or look at stars through telescopes, but to use science, particularly physics and math, to figure out the biggest questions in the universe. 

She got her start as a science communicator in first grade. “My teacher let me share one science fact after every science lesson,” she says. Years later, she started sharing those science facts online.

Sage credits her parents with bringing her to astronomy and astrophysics events in the Boston area when she was growing up. That’s why when it came time to decide which university to attend, she was able to ask renowned Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell for his advice. He recommended UMass Lowell for its caring physics faculty and its observatory.

That advice turned out to be right on the money, Sage says. 

“All the physics professors here do care about the students,” she says. “There are a lot of opportunities here at UML to have fun, join clubs, make friends and really connect with people."

The next stop on Sage’s journey will be graduate school, but after that, her plans are as varied as her current activities. Yes, she sees a future as an astrophysicist in academia, but she doesn’t want to give up on inventing, or on the idea of running a science-based television network or even, perhaps, a museum.

Sage’s years at UML have shown that she can pursue all her interests and blend them into a fulfilling whole. “I want to do it all,” she says.