Post-Docs

Bryce is a Senior Researcher at the B612 Asteroid Institute and DIRAC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington. The main focus of his academic studies has been the dynamical processes that affect small body populations in the solar system and their observable consequences. He uses observational and numerical modeling approaches on topics such as ancient asteroid families, Main Belt asteroids, Near-Earth Objects, and comets.

Kim Bott’s research centres around planetary atmospheres and polarimetry, combining instrumentation, observation, and computer models.  Her work at UW is focused on determining the usefulness of polarimetry in exoplanet characterisation, and also on the habitability of terrestrial worlds orbiting M dwarfs.  Her previous work involved applications of polarimetry to debris disks, stars and the ISM; combining polarimetry with transit and secondary eclipse data for hot Jupiters; and the measurement of isotopes in the atmospheres of ice giants.

My research falls in the category of astrostatistics, an interdisciplinary field of astronomy and statistics. On the astronomy side, I’m interested in properties of the Milky Way Galaxy such as its mass and amount of dark matter, as well as its stellar populations, globular cluster population, and central nuclear star cluster. On the statistics side, I’m interested in Bayesian hierarchical modeling, Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques, and in general, implementing and developing modern statistical methods to and for astronomical problems.

Sarah is a joint postdoc with the B612 Asteroid Institute and the DIRAC Center. Her research interests are in orbital dynamics of small bodies in the Solar System, including resonant dynamics, near-Earth asteroids on retrograde orbits, impact and crater formation rates, asteroid-Earth impact probabilities and hazard mitigation, and asteroid observations.

I work on large-scale structure and evolution of the high-redshift intergalactic gas, and its implications on cosmology and the epoch of reionization. My main topic of study is the Lyman-alpha forest measurements and how to use them to constraint various cosmological and astrophysical parameters governing the intergalactic medium. I am working on several aspects of the Lyman-alpha forest, from data-analysis, using new measurements of the various statistics (both large data-sets and small high-resolution data), to large hydro-dynamical simulations of the intergalactic medium, to theoretical modeling.

My primary research focus is massive star geriatrics: the study of the affects of old age on the most massive stars. I am particularly interested in understanding how episodic mass-loss in the last stages of stellar evolution influences the fate of the stars, circumstellar dust formation and chemical enrichment of galaxies. At UW I am developing crowded field photometry science cases and tools for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) nearby galaxies guest observer investigation team (WINGS, GO-SIT).

I currently work as a software and algorithm developer on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope(LSST) as part of the Data Management, Alert Production team at UW. My main interests are in the field of cosmology specifically weak gravitational lensing and large-scale structure and using these measurements to constrain the dark sector of the Universe. I am also involved in the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration(DESC) developing methods to estimate galaxy redshifts from galaxy clustering statistics.

I am interested in developing data analysis techniques using the latest advances in statistical inference in order to leverage complex astronomical data. I work on probabilistic cataloging, a novel Bayesian technique that is able to handle extremely crowded stellar fields. The method is able to handle deblending ambiguities by treating the number of sources itself as a parameter to be inferred, using trans-dimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling.

I work with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Data Management group to develop software for Alert Production. I’m also a researcher in stellar astronomy with a focus on binary and variable stars.

I determine the chemical abundances of stars, primarily ones in globular clusters and dwarf galaxies. I study distant clusters outside of the Milky Way through integrated light spectroscopy, where a single spectrum is obtained from an entire cluster. I use these abundances to study the assembly histories of their host galaxies, globular cluster evolution, and stellar evolution.

My research focuses on star formation in nearby galaxies and its interplay with molecular gas. I’m very interested in the research of new techniques to calibrate star formation and in developing more accurate models of photodissociation in GMCs. I’m also an active member of MaNGA and spend a fair amount of my time developing software for SDSS.

I study planetary atmospheres, habitability, biosignatures, and the emergence of life. I host a podcast called Strange New Worlds, which examines science, technology, and culture through the lens of Star Trek.