June 2021 has officially been the month of many (okay, three) conferences! Last week, I was an invited speaker at the American Astronomical Society’s meeting-in-a-meeting on Thorne-Żytkow objects. My thesis advisor, Emily Levesque, was given the opportunity to chose a meeting topic as part of being awarded the Pierce Prize and invited a bunch of astronomers (including Kip Thorne and… Read more →
Category: News
PhD Defense
On the morning of February 25th, 2021, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation entitled, “The Binary Fraction of Red Supergiants” based on my work done at the University of Washington with advisor Dr. Emily Levesque over the past three and a half years. I was initially nervous and a little disappointed that I would have to defend over Zoom as… Read more →
Dunlap Fellow at the University of Toronto
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve accepted a postdoc position at the University of Toronto as a Dunlap Fellow with a tentative start date of September 1, 2021! Once we’re vaccinated, Garrett and I (and Meg and Marlowe) will be moving to Toronto, Canada for a few years while I explore more massive star research. While I’m a little apprehensive… Read more →
Upcoming AAS Dissertation Talk
Come check out my Dissertation Talk on The Binary Fraction of Red Supergiants at the 2021 Virtual AAS Meeting! I’ll be talking on Monday, January 11th at 12:50 PM ET during Session 119 “Evolved and Variable Stars.” I’m Presentation #119.05 D! See you there! Read more →
Life During A Pandemic
Usually I post about my astronomy-related activities, but I thought I’d put up a post about what I’ve been doing while staying home during the COVID-19 pandemic (spoiler alert: lots of baking and knitting). Living in Seattle, life changed for us pretty early. My last “normal” day in the office was Wednesday, March 4th, 2020. By the time I got… Read more →
MOBSTER Conference Talk
This week I attended my first entirely virtual conference! It was put on by the MOBSTER collaboration and focused mainly on stellar variability and magnetic fields of massive stars (conference website). I was invited to give a contributed talk on Binary Red Supergiants which had very little to do with either stellar variability or magnetic fields … oops! The format… Read more →
Wolf-Rayet Stars: Hot, Massive and Luminous
I did another “Meet an Astronomer” talk for Lowell Observatory! This time I focused on my Wolf-Rayet research. Watch it here: Read more →
Skype A Scientist Presentation on Binary Red Supergiants
After submitting my 90 second video abstract to Skype A Scientist for their No Time Like The Presentation contest, I was chosen to give a live 10 minute talk on my Binary Red Supergiant thesis research! I presented in the second session along with four other early career scientists. Take a look at my 10 minute presentation here (I start… Read more →
Binary Red Supergiants in 90 seconds
Last week Skype a Scientist sent out a call for grad students and post docs to create 90 second videos explaining their research to the public. The best 10 were then selected to give 10 minute live-streamed talks on May 12th and it turns out they liked my video! So, here it is … with guest appearances from Meg and Marlowe… Read more →
Astrobites Guest Post on RSGs!
Take a look at my astrobites guest post on Ming Yang’s paper on how to find Red Supergiants in the Small Magellanic Cloud. My collaborators and I have recently used this method to separate out RSGs from Asymptotic Giant Branch stars in the local group galaxies of M31, M33 and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds! Read more →