Andrew Mann

The Young Worlds Team:

team
From left to right: Matt, Madyson, Andy, Salem, Andrew, Leah (front), Delaney (back), Isabel, Pa Chia, and Reilly


Pa Chia Thao


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 below shows the transmission spectrum of HIP 67522b, taken with JWST. This highlights the power of young planets as they tend to have extended atmospheres with strong features in their transmission spectra. Read more about this in Thao et al. (2024).

hip Read more about Pa Chia's research on her website.

thao

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




Reilly Milburn


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.







milburn



Madyson Barber


Madyson is a third-year graduate student, but started in the lab as an undergraduate and Chancellor Science Scholar. Madyson holds an NSF GRFP fellowship. She runs the TIDYE survey, which focuses on the demographics of young exoplanets from the TESS mission. She also works on age-dating associations based on stellar variability. Read more about Madyson's research on her website.

alignment
This figure shows the distribution of young planets (points) compared to that of the older population from Kepler. The yellow star is the first planet from the TIDYE survey, a 3 Myr planet with a disk.





barber
Madyson's dog, Halee, loves running around Blue Jay Point.





Matthew Fields

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.

alignment
A diagram of a disk and star highlighting how we compare the rotational axis of the star to the orbital axis of the protoplanetary disk



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Andy Boyle

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.



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Isabel Lopez Murillo
isabel
Isabel is a senior computer science major with a minor in astronomy. She works on transit timing variaions in young systems, a method that could help us measure the masses and eccentricities of young planets.


















Leah Boff
Leah is a junior undergraduate. She works on the detection of young transiting planets in TESS data. She focuses on vetting candidate planets with tentative signals to identify likely false positives.

Boff


















William Storch
Storch
Will is a junior undergraduate. He works on transmission spectroscopy of young planets, primarily working with PICASO and POSEIDON to generate model atmospheres and test what we can learn from JWST and HST data of young atmospheres.





















Former team members:

Salem Burtner:
Counselor and outdoor activity educator
Delaney Carlton:
Analytics MS Student at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Jonathan Bush:
Trader at Solea Energy
Mackenna Wood:
Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT
Stephen Schmidt:
Graduate student at Johns Hopkins
Bowen Gu:
Graduate student at Harvard
SJ Espinosa:
Data & Analytics Consultant at CapTech Ventures
Patrick Gorman:
Technical Solutions Engineer at Epic Systems
Jenny Medina:
Research Software Engineer at Sage Bionetworks
Richard Seifert:
AI/ML Scientist at General Motors