From left to right: Matt, Madyson, Andy, Salem, Andrew, Leah (front), Delaney (back), Isabel, Pa Chia, and Reilly
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).
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 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.
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.
Madyson's dog, Halee, loves running around Blue Jay Point.
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.
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
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.
