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Fall 2015 Alumni Spotlight: Aomawa Shields
Aomawa is a classically trained actor and was named a 2015 TED Fellow. She uses her acting skills to communicate science and is the creator of the Rising Stargirls project aimed at increasing participation in science of middle school girls from groups that are typically underrepresented in astronomy. Her current research continues her graduate studies theme of understanding climate on exoplanets. She modifies climate models developed originally for the Earth to apply to worlds orbiting other kinds of stars and has found that it is more difficult to freeze over worlds orbiting dim, low mass stars called M-dwarfs. M-dwarfs emit most of their light in the infrared. Interestingly, ice is strongly absorbing of infrared wavelengths, so ice on planets orbiting M-dwarfs is more likely to melt than on plants orbiting sun-like stars. Her work will help to prioritize targets for the next generation of space telescopes because liquid water is necessary for life as we know it. All life on Earth requires liquid water (which is why the recent discovery of liquid water on Mars caused a stir!) and is considered an integral component of planetary habitability. In the future when we are choosing which exoplanet targets to spend precious observing time on, we will want to seek worlds likely to have nonfrozen water on their surfaces.
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Dr. Aomawa Shields (Astronomy and Astrobiology, 2014) is a NSF Astronomy and Astrophiysics Postdoctoral Fellow and UC President's Postdoctoral Program Fellow at UCLA and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Her research involves questions of habitability and climate of exoplanets. As a graduate student at UW, she focused on understanding the climatic implications of ice-covered surfaces on planets orbiting varied types of stars. She found that the interaction between the star's spectrum and absorption of that light by ice leads to different climatic consequences around varied types of stars. 
