SPRING VALLEY - Spring Valley Elementary School is proud of the districts rich history.

Charles Palia played a major role in establishing the school district and he became the Spring Valley Elementary Foundation's first inductee into the Spring Valley C.C.S.D. Foundation Honors Hall of Fame in 2019.

The Foundation announced Darcy Barron as the the 2020 inductee in the virtual awards program that was held Thursday, July 9.

Barron grew up in Spring Valley and began her education at Lincoln Elementary School. She was always a straight A student, but her top scores on the fifth grade Illinois State Achievement Tests encouraged her teacher, Mrs. Hillstrom, to allow her to advance her studies at her own pace.

In sixth grade at JFK, Barron followed the same accelerated program. By the time she entered seventh grade, it was apparent to the teachers and staff that she should be allowed to skip seventh grade. She took the leap and continued with her extracurricularactivities as a seventh-grade cheerleader, and participated in girls basketball, volleyball, track, band and swing choir.

She shared valedictorian honors at eighth grade graduation.

At Hall High School, Barron continued her straight A streak. She also continued with sports, becoming track captain her senior year and setting a school record in the triple jump. She worked summers as a lifeguard at Spring Valley pool and helped with her familys business - Graphic Electronics - part-time during the school year.

She took the ACT twice to prepare for college applications, scoring 34.5 in her first attempt, and a perfect 36 on the second attempt. Only 134 students out of over a million who took the test that year achieved perfect scores. At graduation she shared valedictorian honors, graduating in 2004.

Barron attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, joining her two older sisters. She chose to major in Engineering Physics, following a passion for physics and cosmology first discovered while reading science magazines from the library as a child.

She became involved in research soon after arriving at U of I, beginning as a research assistant in professor Les Allen's materials science research group. Her undergraduate years at U of I also included two summers working for LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) at Caltech and participation in the Intel Scholars undergraduate research program during the academic year. She graduated with honors in 2008 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Physics, with a minor in Astronomy.

Barron continued her physics education, entering the PhD program at the University of California, San Diego in 2008. She joined a class of 27 students from all over the U.S. and around the world, but she was only one of two women. The other woman in the class grew up in Poland, but had a similar strong interest in cosmology. They remain close friends today.

Barron joined professor Brian Keatings experimental cosmology group as a graduate research assistant in 2009. The group builds telescopes and analyzes their data to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), with the goal of discovering new properties of our universe.

In 2011, she helped commission a new CMB experiment, known as POLARBEAR, and continued to help design the next series of telescopes necessary to expand and improve the experiment. The group worked towards adding two more telescopes known as the Simons Array, named for funding through the Simons Foundation and its founder, mathematician and hedge fund manager Jim Simons.

When she first arrived at the experiment's new location in Chile, the observatory was just shipping containers and a bare telescope structure. By the time Barron graduated in 2015, the group had completed the initial CMB observations and published exciting new results, detecting the signal they had set out to measure, the B-mode gravitational lensing signal.

In 2015, after finishing her Ph.D. at UC San Diego, Barron moved to UC Berkeley to continue working on the POLARBEAR/Simons Array project under an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellowship. The fellowship supported her continued research as well as expanded involvement in education and outreach. Through the Multiverse group at UC Berkeleys Space Sciences Lab, she led an NSF-funded summer research experience program for undergraduates, aimed at first-generation college students and community college students.

The program brought a group of students to the lab over the summer to complete a research project in support of one of the NASA missions or other projects at the lab.

Barron received an offer to become an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, N.M. in 2018. In addition to teaching physics courses, she is building up her research program.

She has designed and built a custom lab space, which features a new refrigeration system for cooling detectors within 0.01 degrees of absolute zero. She also continues her work with the POLARBEAR/Simons Array project, traveling to Chile three times in the past two years.

An additional project was funded in 2019 through the UNM Women in STEM awards, with the title Improving Physics Retention Rates through Early Undergraduate Research Experiences at UNM. Through this program, Barron aims to give students better context for their physics course work in the form of independent research projects.

New Mexico was a natural fit for Barron because she enjoys spending time in the mountains: backpacking, hiking and stargazing. In addition to spending significant time in the mountains of Chile, she has traveled frequently to Japan to work with collaborators building instruments for POLARBEAR/Simons Array. She has also had the opportunity to travel in Europe and Australia for cosmology conferences.

A favorite part of traveling for her is trying new foods, whether its exotic dishes at restaurants or exploring new snacks at a local grocery store. A memorable snack was fried pasta chips from a 7-Eleven in Japan. One of her absolute favorite treats is still Spring Valley Bakery cookies.

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Barron inducted into Spring Valley Elementary's Foundation Hall of Fame - Bureau County Republican