Introducing Molly Peeples

Molly Peeples is an astronomer on the tenure-track at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Molly’s research is broadly on galaxy evolution, with a focus on how galaxies affect and are affected by all of the universe’s gas that is not currently in galaxies. She also spends a lot of time thinking about the origin and fate of all of the elements in the universe not produced in the Big Bang, and how these “metals” can be exploited to learn about the flows of gas into, within, and out of galaxies. As part of her staff position at STScI, Molly is a member of the team in charge of trying to maximize the scientific outputs of the UV spectrographs (COS and STIS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope.

Molly grew up in South Carolina, moved to Massachusetts to go to college at MIT, then to Ohio to get her PhD in astronomy at Ohio State. She then spent three years in beautiful southern California as a postdoc at UCLA before moving back east to Baltimore, where she doesn’t plan on moving away from any time soon. Molly also has a blog featuring galaxies and kitties, which is pretty much what you would expect from the description. She usually tweets about astronomy, life as an astronomer, and related science community issues as @astronomolly.

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Introducing Jo Barstow

Jo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She studies the atmospheres of planets both inside and outside the solar system. Clouds on these planets tend to get in the way of finding out other things about their atmospheres, so she has decided to embrace this fact by taking a particular interest in modelling clouds. Jo is also a keen science outreacher and one of her favourite activities is making model comets out of dry ice.

Jo studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge before crossing to the dark blue side for her DPhil (Oxford’s fancy name for a PhD). She has been working in Oxford since the completion of her doctorate in 2011. When she’s not doing science, she loves reading, singing and taking part in/watching musical theatre — in April she’ll be getting her habit on for an amateur production of Sister Act! She usually tweets about science and singing from @DrJoVian.

Introducing Jay Strader

Jay is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University. Recently his research has centered around compact binaries in the Milky Way, especially searches for accreting black holes in globular clusters. His interests also include the distribution of dark matter around galaxies, the formation of stellar halos, and the initial mass function of stars in massive star clusters.

From 2007-2012 he was a Hubble Fellow and Menzel Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He earned his BS in Physics and Mathematics at Duke University, and his PhD at the University of California-Santa Cruz. As his Twitter biography says (@caprastro), he loves “goats, birds, the Celtics, and globular clusters”.