POSITION
Graduate Student, Astronomy

AB Degree Track
Dual-Title PhD

Faculty Advisor
Victoria Meadows

ASTROBIOLOGY RESEARCH AREAS
Exoplanets: Detection, Habitability, & Biosignatures

EMAIL
gialluca@uw.edu

BOX NUMBER
351850

Megan Gialluca

Areas of interest: habitability of exoplanets, atmospheric biosignatures, detection and characterization of atmospheric constituents.

At the University of Washington, I work with Victoria Meadows to study the atmospheres of terrestrial planets with M star hosts. I’m particularly interested in volatile loss due to thermal hydrodynamic atmospheric escape, in oxygenated atmopsheres and oxygen as a false positive biosignature, in the evolution of outgassed atmospheres, and in the promising targets of the TRAPPIST-1 system.

Before coming to Seattle, I grew up in New Hampshire then moved to Flagstaff, Arizona to complete my bachelors degree in Astronomy and Physics. In AZ I worked to assess JWST’s ability to observe Earth analogs around M type stars. I also worked for Lowell Observatory in education outreach and instrumentation for observing meteors with the Lowell Observatory Cameras for All-sky Meteor Surveillance (LO-CAMS) project.

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