Past and Current Members

Ishaan Padmawar

Ishaan is a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He joined the group in the Spring of 2024, and is currently working on improving the group's analysis pipelines for our CV star project.

Erika Torkildsen

Erika is an alumni of Merrimack College (Mechanical Engineering, class of '21), who has returned to get an M.S. in Data Science. She joined the group in Summer 2023, and is focused on observing the early light curves of SN Ia using the remote telescopes.

Brennan Heim

Brennan is a civil engineering major here at Merrimack College, in the class of 2026. During the Summer of 2023, and worked on studying CV stars with the remote telescopes and the Mendel Observatory.

Adrianna Marinello

Adrianna is an electrical engineering major here at Merrimack College, in the class of 2026. She joined the group in Summer of 2023, and worked on studying CV stars with the remote telescopes and the Mendel Observatory.

Bradley LeMasurier

Bradley is a physics major here at Merrimack College, in the class of 2025. He joined the group in Summer of 2023, and worked on studying CV stars with the remote telescopes and the Mendel Observatory.

Jacob Pelletier

Jacob is a Physics major here at Merrimack, in the class of 2025. He joined the group in Spring 2023, and is worked on collecting the early lightcurves of supernovae with the remote telescopes. He continued with the group in Summer 2023 on the CV project.

Lindsey Bell

Lindsey is a Biology major, physics minor here at Merrimack, in the class of 2025. She joined the group in Spring 2023, and worked on collecting the early lightcurves of supernovae with the remote telescopes.

Leonardo Venturotti

Leo was a biology and physics double major at Merrimack College, and graduated in 2023. During the winter 2023 session, he worked on the group's first exoplanet project, trying to demonstrate that we can observe transiting exoplanets with the on-campus Mendel Observatory. In the Summer of 2023 he worked on both the CV project, as well as the early lightcurves of SN Ia with the remote telescopes.

Austin Higinbotham

Austin was a physics major at Merrimack College, and joined MCARG for the summer SCURCA fellowship program in Summer 2021. He studied CV stars using the Mendel Observatory and the remote telescope network. He also worked during the Winter of 2022-2023 on the SN Ia project, as well as the first observations of exoplanets the group has done. He graduated in 2024, and is going on to graduate school at the University of Rhode Island.

Isabella Miranda

Isabella worked with the group in Spring 2022. She has a lifelong interest in astronomy, and worked on the group's SN Ia monitoring program with the iTelescope network.

Francisco Quintana

Francisco was an engineering major at Merrimack College, and joined MCARG for the summer SCURCA fellowship program in Summer 2021. He studied CV stars using the Mendel Observatory and the remote telescope network, and during Spring 2023 has also starting collecting early lightcurve data on supernovae using the remote telescopes. He graduated in 2023.

Bernardo Santos

Bernardo was a computer science major at Merrimack College (class of 2022). He started working with the group in Spring 2021, developing methods to identify double- vs single-degenerate SN Ia in an open archival data set. He also participated in the SCRUCA fellowship program in Summer 2021, studying CV stars with the remote telescope network. His work resulted in the group's first publicly available paper, Looking for the "Blue Bump" in the Early Light Curve of SN Ia using and Open Supernovae Catalog.

Noah Kravette

Noah Kravette is a physics major at UMASS Amherst, and did an internship with MCARG in the summer of 2020. He was in charge of managing observations of M87 using the remote iTelescope network. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth Science at UCONN.

Helly Patel

Helly was a physics major at Merrimack College, and worked with the group during the spring of 2020. She is currently majoring in physics at Boston University. She rejoined the group in Fall 2024 to complete an independent study on a variety of observational phenomena.

Noor Shams

Noor Shams was a physics major at Merrimack College. She joined the group in the spring of 2020, working on an independent study on asteroid light curves, and continued to work on that, as well as the early light curves of SN Ia. She graduated in 2022.

Chris Wildman

Chris Wildman was a Physics major at Merrimack College (graduated in 2023). He worked on the first SCURCA project in the summer of 2019, and continued to work with the group on the observation of supernovae through 2020.

Earl James Alingasa

Earl James Alingasa double majored in Mathematics and physics at Merrimack College and worked from 2019-2020 on the observation of supernovae.

Chase Olsen

Chase Olsen attended Merrimack College from the fall of 2018 to the spring of 2019. While at Merrimack he was on the Men Ice Hockey team as a forward. While Chase was at Merrimack he majored in Physics. He worked on the first SCURCA project in the summer of 2019 before departing for the University of Toronto.

James Beigel

James Biegel graduated from Merrimack College in 2018 with a degree in Physics before moving on to the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. Before he left, he worked on creating Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams of open clusters with the Merrimack Observatory, work which has appeared in our on-campus undergraduate research journal, Across the Bridge.

Professor Christopher Duston

Professor Duston has been a faculty member in the physics department at Merrimack College since 2014, and has served as the observatory director since 2018. His primary research focus is classical and quantum gravity, which is detailed on his personal research page. His early work in astronomy was focused on modeling the planetary nebula luminosity function by including contributions from blue straggler stars (thesis), and is currently interested in using networks of small telescopes (<0.5 m) to observe transient phenomena, such as variable stars and novae.

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