I am Ben Lew, a research scientist at Bay Area Environmental Research Institute / NASA Ames Research Center.

As a member of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Guaranteed Time Observation (GTO) programs, I am preparing the observations and data analysis of brown dwarfs and protostars. Under the GTO programs 1189 (NIRCam Y-Dwarfs) and 1186 (Protostar (YSO) Spectroscopy), I work with Dr. Tom Roellig and Dr. Tom Greene, as well as other GTO team members, to characterize late-T/Y dwarf atmospheres and the photospheres of young Class-0 protostars.

During my Ph.D. study at the University of Arizona, I worked with Dr. Daniel Apai to study the heterogeneous atmospheres of ultracool brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects. I had been involved in multiple small and large Hubble Space Telescope (HST) programs. Using the high-precision HST Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3)/G141 time-series spectroscopy, my research results provide key insights on the possible heterogeneous cloud properties in L and T dwarf atmospheres. In addition, my study of a rare eclipsing white-dwarf brown-dwarf binary advances our understanding of the irradiated atmosphere with an extremely short rotation rate.