Research + Outreach Projects

Constraining the Ages of Candidate Young Brown Dwarfs

My first project in astronomy research will always hold a warm place in my heart. As part of AstroCom NYC, an NSF sponsored program at the American Museum of Natural History, Victoria DiTomasso (Hunter College, Class of 2018), and I worked with Dr. Emily Rice of the BDNYC Collaboration. We reduced high-resolution spectroscopic infrared data for 11 nearby, candidate young brown dwarfs and measured their radial velocities using cross-correlation techniques. We used these RVs along with parallax distances and proper motions to confirm young moving group candidacy for three of the brown dwarfs. I presented a poster on this project at the 227th meeting of the AAS and won a Chambliss Astronomy Award for Best Poster for my presentation.

Radio Explorations in Ultracool Dwarf Magnetism

For my undergraduate thesis project I decided to combine two of my favorite things: magnetic fields and ultracool dwarfs (UCDs). UCDs have surprisingly strong magnetic fields considering that they are fully convective and their atmospheres are electrically neutral. Working with Dr. Kelle Cruz, Dr. Peter Williams, and Dr. David Hogg, I compiled a sample of previously observed radio luminosities for ~200 UCDs and using rigorous Bayesian statistics, I have analyzed their radio luminosity as linear functions of several fundamental parameters. I am now working to use these initial relationships as priors to investigate the possibility of multiple subpopulations with varying magnetic characteristics which can provide constraints to current UCD dynamo theory. I presented a poster on my work so far at Cool Stars 19 in Sweden and first-authored a journal paper in the Cool Stars proceedings. I will be defending my thesis in the Spring of 2017.

Searching for Gravitational Waves in Pulsar Noise

I had the wonderful opportunity to spend this past summer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's NSF REU Program. I worked with Dr. Scott Ransom of the NANOGrav Collaboration on quantifying variability in the individual pulse shapes of pulsars, known as pulsar jitter. Pulsar jitter is caused by intrinsic effects of pulsar emission production and can mask the noise caused by gravitational waves that we would expect to see in their arrival times. I wrote a software data-reduction pipeline called jitterpipe to preserve the time resolution available in raw telescope collection. Using jitterpipe, I investigated jitter visibility on the brightest days of NANOGrav's 10 brightest pulsars at several time resolutions. I presented this poster at Columbia University's Astrofest 2016 and won best poster for my presentation.

Reviving the CCNY Planetarium

Over the past decade, the once highly-active CCNY Planetarium decreased its programming to a few shows every year or so, closing its doors in late 2013. I have been working together with a group of dedicated students to revive our planetarium. As the CCNY Planetarium's first Student Director, I have coordinated planetarium shows on the local night sky, dark energy, and cosmic inflation along with sidewalk astronomy events, allowing many students to view Saturn, Jupiter and the surface of the moon through a telescope for the first time. Each of these events has been attended to capacity, resulting in higher astronomy interest and engagement on campus. Victoria DiTomasso (Hunter College, 2018) and I are working on a planetarium curriculum that will allow CCNY's Astronomy 101 professors to use the planetarium as a supplement to their classes even after this first cohort of dedicated students has graduated.

Building an Amateur Radio Telescope at CCNY

I will be working on this project during the upcoming Spring semester with Roberto Moncada (CCNY, Class of 2018), Anastasia Spiridonova (CCNY, Class of 2018), and Dr. James Hedberg. We will be using a reclaimed satellite television dish, a hacked LNB, a couple of arduinos and a raspberry pi. More details to come!