Alexandra Masegian
Alexandra Masegian is a PhD student in astronomy at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History. Her research interests include massive stars, binary evolution, and the origin of the chemical elements.
Andy Boyle
Andy Boyle is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research investigates the origins of exoplanets and the evolution of stellar clusters. By developing advanced time-series algorithms to detect transiting exoplanets in the spot-dominated light curves of active young stars and using stellar rotation to map dissolving open clusters, he aims to reveal how exoplanets form and evolve alongside their stellar environments.
Aritra Aich
Aritra, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, works on gravitationally lensed galaxies at cosmic noon, specializing in spatially resolved outflows and the development of data reduction pipeline tools for KCWI to analyze spectroscopic data.
Audrey Budlong
Audrey is a physics PhD student at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research focuses on Differential Chromatic Refraction (DCR). DCR stretches the point spread function (PSF) of astronomical sources making them appear to shift position and causes the differential spread of wavelengths. Audrey’s work introduces a new way to account for these PSF position errors. By taking repeated observations of the sky over varying observing conditions, she will build an innovative model of the spectrum of each pixel in each region of the sky. This produces a more fine-grained spectrum that is distinct for different object types, which is important when attempting to identify unusual sources (like active galactic nuclei). Her project also applies the algorithms to make accurate subtraction templates to reduce the number of false positive source detections.
Carlos Eduardo Falandes
Graduated in Computer Science from the Faculdade de Tecnologia do Estado de São Paulo (FATEC), he was a research fellow in remote sensing and image processing at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). He is currently a master’s student in Applied Computing at INPE and a junior researcher at the Brazilian Participation Group (BPG-LSST), where he researches galaxy morphological classification and anomaly prediction/detection.
Eduardo Munguia Gonzalez
Eduardo is a graduate student at Penn State University who uses machine learning to study high-energy astrophysical phenomena, including GRB afterglows and supernovae. His research focuses on developing deep learning emulators for computationally intensive simulations to perform large-scale parameter inference.
Ekaterine Dadiani
I’m Ekaterine Dadiani, originally from Tbilisi, Georgia, and currently a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University. My research focuses on identifying massive black hole binaries by analyzing Doppler-induced shifts in emission-line spectra from optical observations, primarily using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) as well as SDSS and LSST. I also use machine learning techniques to efficiently detect and characterize these systems, aiming to better understand their role in galaxy mergers and evolution. Outside of research, I enjoy skiing and film photography.
Erin Kimbro
I am a graduate student at Washington State University working on identifying and characterizing AGN in dwarf galaxies. The broad goals of my research is to identify low mass black holes in dwarf galaxies via variability, and characterize their relationship to their host galaxy.
Gianni Sims
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are central to the evolution of galaxies, yet their origins remain enigmatic. This research explores the competing light seed and heavy seed models for SMBH formation, examining their theoretical underpinnings and observational constraints. Using data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Deep Drilling Fields—W-CDF-S, XMM-LSS, and ELAIS-S1—this study constructs Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) Occupation Fraction (AGN OF) plots to compare observed SMBH distributions with theoretical predictions. Employing robust AGN selection criteria, including spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) methods, reliable AGN candidates were identified. Completeness plots were created to address observational biases, enabling corrections to AGN OF distributions. The corrected plots reveal trends in AGN presence as a function of galaxy mass and redshift, providing insights into SMBH growth and their host galaxies. By transitioning from AGN OF to Black Hole Occupation Fraction (BHOF) plots, the study evaluates the broader implications of seeding mechanisms on galaxy evolution. This work emphasizes the importance of deep-field observations in refining our understanding of SMBH formation pathways and their cosmic roles.
Haniyeh Tajer
I’m a graduate student at the Ohio State University. In general, I’m interested at exoplanets. Currently, I am working on N-body simulations of late stage planet formation, focusing on Mercury and Exo-Mercury formation.
Jackie Zhuoqi Zhang
Jackie is a graduate student at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He is broadly interested in understanding systematics in weak lensing cosmology with LSST, such as photometric redshifts and shear measurements. He is currently working on LSST Commissioning and using the Commissioning data to assess image quality.
Jillian Paulin
Jillian is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in supernova cosmology, and is currently working on predicting core collapse supernova rates in LSST and what this will reveal about the star formation history of the universe. She has previously studied the effect of dark matter on stellar evolution, including the search for supermassive dark stars.
Maria Chernyavskaya
Maria is a third year graduate student at Northern Arizona University. She studies populations of outlier asteroids in massive sky surveys using Big Data approaches.
Nasser Mohammed
Nasser is a PhD student at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on characterizing and modelling stellar streams using observational data to constrain the nature of dark matter on sub-galactic scales.
Kai Herron
I am a second-year graduate student at Dartmouth working with Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil’s group on understanding low-mass galaxies. My research focuses on low-surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs), which are some of the most diffuse galaxies in our universe. These galaxies are predicted to form naturally within the Lambda-CDM cosmology, but have been extraordinarily difficult to study due to their faint surface brightness. My research focuses on developing tools to efficiently identify LSBGs and deliver catalogues that can be used to constrain these galaxies that lie at the extremes of galaxy evolution! In my free-time I like to write poetry, hike, play Dungeons and Dragons, listen to music, and hang out with my cat, Grunckle Stan!
Natalie LeBaron
Natalie LeBaron is a graduate student in the Astronomy Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Natalie is an observer interested in time domain astronomy, especially engine driven explosions. Her research focuses on the optical and infrared behavior of transients such as supernovae and luminous fast blue optical transients.
Patricia Iglesias
I am a PhD student in astrophysics at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, in Spain. I work in the field of galaxy formation and evolution, using cutting-edge data-driven approaches to infer stellar population properties from JWST and Euclid observations.
Saarah Hall
Saarah is a PhD student at Northwestern University who studies supernova populations via hierarchical Bayesian modeling. She is also developing data reduction software as part of the commissioning team for the upcoming instrument SEDM-KP (Spectral Energy Distribution Machine at Kitt Peak).
Tanner Murphey
Tanner is a PhD student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He detects, collects, and analyzes the data on hundreds of extremely young supernovae with the Dark Energy Camera, probing for insights into how their host galaxies shape them and how they shape their host galaxies.
Ullas Bhat
Ullas is a PhD student at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the identification of primordial planetesimals and ancient asteroid families, as well as the characterization of known asteroid families to help understand the composition of the early solar system.