Pa Chia holds three fellowships: the NSF GRFP, Jack Kent Cooke, and Zona Amelia Earhart. She is a sixth-year graduate student in the in the Department. Her research focuses on characterizing atmospheres of young planets through their transit depth as a function of wavelength (transmission spectroscopy). The greater goal is to study how planetary atmospheres change with time by comparing the transmission spectra of young planets to their older counterparts.

The figure on the right shows transits of the 700 million-year-old planet, K2-25b, taken with (top to bottom) K2, LCO, MEarth, and two Spitzer bands. The K2 transit appears 'smoother' because of the long integration time (30m) compared to the other datasets (3 minutes or lower). The difference in transit depth over these wavelengths tells us about the overall properties of the planet. More on these observations can be found in Thao et al. (2020). Read more about Pa Chia's research on her website.

Pa Chia's dog, Wally, is a major contributor to her scientific productivity, but needs to work on his organization skills.

Reilly is a sixth-year graduate student in the in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He is interested in young exoplanets and stellar systems. His current work focuses on the detection of the extended atmospheres (exospheres) of young planets using transmission spectroscopy in regions related to atmospheric escape (e.g., Hα and He10830). The greater goal is to understand how planets lose their atmospheres as they evolve (e.g., photoevaporation).

When Reilly is not poring through data, he likes to play guitar, shoot photography, and play tabletop games with friends.

Madyson is a third-year graduate student, but started as an undergraduate. Madyson holds an NSF GRFP fellowship. Her research focuses on building automated querying and search tools for rapid characterizing of newly identified planets (and their host stars) from the TESS mission. She also works on age-dating associations based on stellar variability. Read more about Madyson's research on her website.



Madyson's dog, Halee, loves running around Blue Jay Point, but has trouble with python.

Matt is a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research interests include both observational and computational astronomy, particularly on stars and planets. He is also interested in science policy, science education, and science communication. Currently, Matt works on deriving improved radii of young stars with protoplanetary disks using a combination of stellar models and semi-empirical relations. The goal is to understand how often planet-forming disks (and hence the young planets they form) are aligned with the rotational spin of their host stars.

Matt's cats, Dudley (left) and Maizie (right) often contribute to group meetings, but really struggle with error propagation.

Andy is a second-year graduate student and NSF GRFP fellow. He studies the rotation of young and middle-aged stars. He is interested in how we assign ages to stars from their rotation, how we measure rotation from light curves (e.g., from TESS, Kepler, and K2), and what we can learn about stellar clusters/associations from the rotation of their member stars.

Salem is a senior astrophysics undergraduate. They study the ages of young comoving groups from a range of metrics (e.g., rotation, kinematics, and lithium). When they aren't doing research, Salem likes to hike, craft, read, and play guitar.