News

ExoExplorer Rasmussen!

2/2/21

This news is something like a month old, but still worth celebrating here: group member Kaitlin Rasmussen was selected for the inaugural cohort of ExoExplorers! Congratulations, Kaitlin. Can't wait to see how y'all change the field!

Welcoming new group members

9/1/20

We have two new postdoctoral researchers in the group this Fall: Kaitlin and Ryan, whose information can now be found under Group Members!

I'm not putting out any job advertisements this year, but if you are considering the 51 Peg b, NASA HFP, and/or NSF postdoctoral fellowships and wondering whether U. Michigan might be a good host institution for you, please feel free to email me.

Group member updates!

4/21/20

While we're all stuck at home being responsible curve-flatteners (a phrase that would have made no sense last year), I realized there's a bunch of exciting news to share about group members, so let's celebrate! Every sentence in this post has an exclamation mark!

• Caleb Harada has accepted an offer to join the astro PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley!

• Deryl Long has accepted an offer to join the astro PhD program at the University of Virginia!

• Hayley Beltz was selected to give an oral presentation at Exoplanets III this summer!

• Isaac Malsky's paper with Leslie Rogers is out!

We're also excited to be welcoming two new postdocs into the group in the fall: Kaitlin Rasmussen (to work on our high-resolution spectroscopy program) and Ryan Challener (to work on building our eclipse mapping framework)!

Postdoc positions available

10/22/19

Do you have expertise in exoplanet atmospheres, or something similar? Do you have experience with high resolution spectroscopy, or something related? (And do you, or will you, have a PhD by the end of the summer?) Please apply to come work with me: https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/668e94d0 As described in the ad, I'm looking for one postdoc to help lead a new high-resolution spectroscopy program we're starting at the University of Michigan (generously funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation). The second postdoc position is more flexible; I'm looking for someone who wants to come work with me on science that we both find interesting, so this should be someone who has their own ideas for fun projects.

Introducing a new member of our group

9/10/19

He actually started a week ago, but I'm finally getting around to make a post here welcoming the new graduate student member of our group: Isaac Malsky, who is joining us after completing his bachelors at U Chicago and spending a year in the non-academic work force. He'll be adding another project to our high-res spectroscopy focus, in particular he'll be studying how the Doppler signatures of atmospheric motion (winds and rotation) change with non-equatorial viewing geometries or, in other words, for non-transiting planets. A big thanks to undergrad Deryl Long, whose work last year built the spherical geometry / rotational matrix / re-mapping framework that we'll need to do this.

Summer exoplanet conferences

9/4/19

The semester has officially started, but just a few weeks ago I got to attend two great conferences (and both ongoing series): ExoClimes V in Oxford, UK and Extreme Solar Systems IV in Reykjavik, Iceland. I gave a talk and a poster, but more than anything enjoyed meeting new scientists and having great conversations. ExoClimes was also Hayley's first international conference (pictured below, on the left, showing off the preliminary results from her project), while ExSS gave me the chance to reconnect with the Erins who were previously part of my research group (pictured below, on the right).

Communicating science

7/17/19

Last week I was in Tucson at the Cottrell Scholar Conference, where I got to meet other Cottrell Scholars and learn about "Communicating Science". We heard keynote talks from Katie Orenstein, Founder and CEO of The OpEd Project, and Brandon Echter, Digital Managing Editor of Science Friday. Earlier in the week I also attended great a pre-conference workshop on Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences.

It was also last week that the straw finally broke this camel's back and I joined Twitter: @astronemly

Dr. Erin May

5/21/19

Today Erin successfully defended her thesis! It has been a wonderful five years and a delight having Erin in this group. I can't wait to see how her career progresses from here on out!

Scialog 2019

5/20/19

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the 2019 Scialog on Time Domain Astrophysics. This Scialog ("science" + "dialogue") was co-sponsored by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Heising-Simons Foundation, with additional support from the Kavli Foundation. The basic idea is that a few dozen early career scientists, from a variety of subfields and with wide-ranging expertise, got together for a few days at a resort in Tucson for a program of facilitated discussions. Basically, an ideas incubator. Then, we had the opportunity to break into teams of 2-3 people (with the requirement that you couldn't be on a team with anyone you'd collaborated with before) to write 2-page proposals, within less than 20 hours. The foundations will choose some of these for seed funding. I had a great time and recommend applying to be a Scialog Fellow (to participate in one of these events), if you have opportunity to do so.

Congratulations, Erin!

2/25/19

After she defends this summer, Erin May will be heading off to Space Telescope Science Institute for a postdoctoral research position in the Space Telescope Advanced Research Group on the Atmospheres of Transiting Exoplanets (STARGATE ... one of the more impressive acronyms I've seen). In particular, she will be working with David Sing, Kevin Stevenson, and Hannah Wakeford on their huge phase curve programs with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, in addition to whatever other projects she chooses to pursue. This is an exciting step forward for Erin, which she is sure to leverage into even greater things continuing onward. Congratulations, Erin!

Cottrell Scholar Award

2/11/19

I am honored and delighted to be named a 2019 Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement! I'm glad others are as excited as I am about creating three-dimensional maps of exoplanets and figuring out how to include research activities within exoplanet classes.

Papers, posters, and presentations

1/9/19

This week the American Astronomical Society's annual winter meeting is taking place in Seattle. Deryl Long and Caleb Harada both presented their work-in-progress as posters, while Erin May gave her dissertation talk. We also found out today that Michael Roman's active cloud paper has been accepted to the Astrophysical Journal!

Getting ready to start a new year

8/20/18

The beginning of Fall semester is fast approaching. We are excited to be welcoming a new class of graduate students, including Hayley Beltz, who is joining our research group. Also, even though Caleb has finished his time in Ann Arbor (and we are sad to see him go), he is luckily still going to continue his research with us, under the direct guidance of our collaborator Eliza Kempton at his home department in Maryland.

Science in the summertime

7/18/18

Two weeks ago I had the chance to visit the lovely city of Budapest for "Unsolved Problems in Astrophysics and Cosmology", while Erin attended the giant "Exoplanets II" conference and the smaller "Spectroscopy of Exoplanets" meeting (presenting two different posters, one on her theory project and one on her observational work). We're also celebrating the acceptance of Erin's first paper from the MOPSS project!

This month we also wish bon voyage to group members Michael Roman and Lily Larson, who are moving on to exciting new jobs.

Summer research group

6/15/18

On Wednesday we had a group picnic at Ann Arbor's Top of the Park summer festival. This was nicely timed with a visit from our collaborator Eliza Kempton, on her way from Iowa to her new position at the University of Maryland. It was also a nice way to welcome our new summer member: Caleb Harada (who is coincidentally a student at Maryland).

From left to right are: Eliza Kempton (and her offspring), Caleb Harada, Lily Larson, Deryl Long, Michael Roman, and myself (my offspring declined to join us in the picture)

Talk circuit

5/3/18

A nice consequence of U Michigan's semester ending sooner than many other places is that I can accept colloquium invitations for after I'm done teaching and more freely able to travel. I just finished a series of talks where I got to visit:

• U Chicago, which was conveniently timed with the launch of TESS (yay!) so a group of us watched the video feed of that together

• U Arizona, which was a fun return to a past home of mine and I got to see a great movie about Hedy Lamarr called Bombshell

• U Toronto, which decided to time my visit with a Planet Day at the Center for Planetary Sciences so I got to hear about a bunch of cool science

Up, up, and away!

4/20/18

We've had a lot of great students in the group this year, many of whom are moving on to new and exciting things. In particular:

• Marah Brinjikji will be pursuing a PhD in Astrophysics at Arizona State University

• Victoria DiTomasso will be pursuing a PhD in Astronomy at Harvard, after spending a year in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar

• Zachary Felker will be pursuing a PhD in Physics at the University of Central Florida

• Mariam Haidar is joining the Peace Corps

Congratulations, everyone! I'm excited to see where your careers take you.

We also celebrated our undergraduate researchers at the Astronomy department's annual undergraduate poster fair. We even managed to grab a group photo with everyone. (Thanks to Shannon Murphy!)

From left to right are: Erin May, Michael Roman, Marah Brinjikji, Zachary Felker, Deryl Long, Teanna Sims, Mariam Haidar (who is coincidentally holding a copy of the program, which she designed), Evan Scott, Lily Larson, and myself

A hot Jupiter with backwards winds

1/26/18

Lisa Dang has presented a new result in Nature Astronomy (and I got to be a co-author!) in which she found that an odd hot Jupiter seems to have winds blowing in the opposite direction from all of the others we've observed and in contrast to what our standard models predict.

You can find a press release here and the actual article here (if you have a subscription)

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC)

Early Release Science with JWST!

11/13/17

The selections for the James Webb Space Telescope Director’s Discretionary Early Release Science Program were announced today. Exoplanet science makes up 25% of the successful ERS programs, and ~2/3 of that time goes to a large community program with 100+ people, including Erin and yours truly. The ERS observations are supposed to "take place during the first 5 months of JWST science operations, following the 6-month commissioning period." So it may be a while, but I'm very excited to see the data once it's ready!

Colloquia, conferences, etc.

11/8/17

I just finished my last bit of work travel for the semester! But it's all been a lot of fun. I've been able to visit/participate in:

• 9/21: an ITC colloquium at the CfA

• 10/2: a colloquium at CU Boulder

• 10/10: a seminar at McGill

• 10/16-17: the MIRA Origins of Volatiles in Habitable Planets workshop

• 11/3-4: the National Society of Black Physicists meeting

Papers, eclipses, and new members!

9/28/17

Since I am now resurrecting my website from the clutches of Google's "there was an error publishing the site", there are several exciting things I can report since the last post:

1. Erin M. and Tyler made more trips down to observe transit spectra with Magellan

2. Victoria ended her SROP program, with fantastic oral and poster presentations

3. A TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE happened within the U.S. (my family traveled to eastern Oregon)

4. Mike and I had our papers accepted

5. The new school year has started and with it, a large influx of new members into the research group!

Enabling Transiting Exoplanet Observations with JWST

7/13/17

Erin May, Michael Roman, and I just got back from attending this conference at Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Erin presented a poster about her Magellan observations of transiting planets, Mike gave a poster about his GCMs with clouds that influence the radiative transfer (and so the atmospheric structure), and I gave a talk about how to measure non-zero obliquities of warm Jupiters. I had a lot of fun and my brain's excited about all sorts of science!

I also got to go peak inside the Mission Operations Center for JWST (full of blank screens and empty chairs right now). If you look carefully, you'll see the reflected images of Jonathan Fortney and our personal tour guide Nikole Lewis (project scientist for JWST).

Summer research group

6/5/2017

This summer we welcome the new addition of Victoria DiTomasso to our group. She is an undergrad at Hunter College (in NYC) and will be here doing research for the summer.

We also welcome the return/continued participation of Erin Flowers, who will be spending most of her summer here.

We wish bon voyage to Veenu Suri, who has the opportunity to gain some more research experience working in Prof. Michael Meyer's group. (He'll still be here in the department, so we'll still get to see him around!)

End of the semester

4/30/2017

Phew, I made it through my first semester teaching a new senior-level Exoplanets class. It was a bunch of work, but also a lot of fun (thanks to a great group of students). I even seem to have indoctrinated my offspring ...

Grad school plans!

4/19/2017

Our graduating undergrads have officially accepted offers for PhD programs in the Fall! Congratulations to Erin Flowers, who will be attending Princeton, and Jisheng Zhang, who will be attending U Chicago!

and they're back!

1/9/2017

Jisheng Zhang (Grinnell), Erin Flowers (Columbia), and Veenu Suri (U Michigan) representing exoplanet atmospheres at the AAS!

Students attending the AAS meeting

1/2/2017

Erin Flowers and Veenu Suri are on their way to the AAS to present posters on their research! At the Thursday evening poster session, go check out Erin's poster (245.07. Using Transmission Spectroscopy to Determine the Rotation Rate of HD 189733b), Veenu's poster (245.19. The Perfect Map), and our undergrad collaborator Jisheng's poster (245.23. Constraining hot Jupiter’s atmospheric structure and dynamics through Doppler shifted emission spectra). Have a great meeting, everyone.

Collaborators visiting, new summer student, and group picnic

6/8/2016

We were pleased to have friend and collaborator Eliza Kempton visiting us for the last couple of days, with her summer student Jisheng Zhang (undergrad at Grinnell). The timing for the trip was great because it also coincided with the beginning of the Physics Department's REU program, through which we'll have Erin Flowers (undergrad at Columbia) working with us this summer. We celebrated two days of great new science in Ann Arbor by grabbing some sandwiches from Zingerman's and having a picnic dinner in the Arb.

New paper

5/31/2016

Erin's first paper is now available on the arXiv, having recently been accepted to ApJ! Go check out "Examining Tatooine: Atmospheric Models of Neptune-Like Circumbinary Planets" to learn about why circumbinary gas planets can be modeled as if they were around a single star (with the combined light of the binary pair).

Congratulations, Erin!

5/10/2016

At the end of last week Erin took her Prelim and (of course) successfully passed! Very well done, Erin!

Michigan introduction

2/15/2016

Here's a nice piece describing my career, featured on the Astro Department's website.