Kim Katris McLeod

I've been on the faculty at Wellesley College since 1997, and in 2019 became the Director of the beautiful Whitin Observatory where Astronomy is for Everybody.

I spent some time as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow.

I used to be an astrophysics postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (where I have also spent some sabbaticals).

Before that, I was a lowly astronomy grad student at Steward Observatory (University of Arizona) where I did my Ph.D. under George Rieke.

I spent my undergraduate years as a physics major at Cornell University, where the weather gods granted me many happy nights of observing with the Fuertes Observatory 12" refractor -- here's photographic proof.   I also worked under Jim Houck to build the first CCD camera that was used on the Hartung Boothroyd Telescope.

And way back when, I got my start as a true blue Delawarean. I did a lot of this (ending here).

Spending time with my husband and kids

Playing mandolin and listening to lots of music

Being active

• Kung Fu (1st degree black belt 2019, 2nd degree black belt 2021, 3rd degree 2024, instructor 2022)

• biking to work

• occasionally being upside down.

• once upon a time I was a juggler.

• I have also coached youth gymnastics, track, basketball, and soccer.

Being outside--Needham forecast, satellite loop, radar loop, ClearSky

Astronomy ;-)  And I still love APOD, even nonastronomical ones like this

Exoplanet transit measurements

• • I am a member of the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) FOP (Follow-up Observing Program).   My students and I use our beautiful PlaneWave CDK700 to vet TESS candidates.

  • Previously we were KFUN collaborators on the very neat KELT project.  On the KELT-18b discovery paper I'm not just an 'et al.'!

  • I've been at this a while. For fun I made my first exoplanet transit observation way back in 2001 after the first one had been discovered.

Galaxies with supermassive central black holes.  I used some of the world's finest telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope, Magellan  and Gemini North, to investigate the host galaxies of quasars in the near-IR.   One early paper helped to usher in the black hole-bulge relation.  A 2009 ApJ paper described the most distant ones.

Disks and giant planets around young stars and brown dwarfs. I have used the Hubble Space Telescope to look for them.  We think we found a planetary mass object in the Taurus star-forming region ( 2010 ApJ Letter), and also a Taurus brown dwarf disk (2007 Ap J paper).  And here is a 2014 ApJ paper reporting on the bigger search.

Near Earth Objects (NEOs).  Here's a 2015 Planetary and Space Science paper that quantifies why we need to act quickly after discovery if we want to measure NEO properties.