Introducing Hanno Rein

Hanno Rein  is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. His research interests include planet formation and migration, celestial mechanics, Saturn’s rings, numerical algorithms and high performance computing. He is the maker of the wildly popular Exoplanet App.  You can find him tweeting the rest of the year at @hannorein.

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Introducing Jeyhan Kartaltepe

Jeyhan Kartaltepe is an assistant professor in her first year at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester New York. Her research involves studying how galaxies evolve over time, specifically looking at the role that galaxy mergers and interactions have played. She is a multiwavelength observational astronomer using data from telescopes all over the world, on the ground and in space and is a part of several international collaborations including COSMOS, GOODS, and CANDELS. She is very active in public education and outreach and maintains, edits, and writes for the CANDELS blog.

Jeyhan is originally from San Antonio, TX but moved to Hamilton, NY to attend Colgate University for her undergraduate degree. There she majored in Astronomy-Physics and took advantage of opportunities to do research, including a project using the campus 16 inch telescope. She then went to the University of Hawaii to obtain her masters and PhD degrees in Astronomy. After graduating, she moved to Tucson, Arizona to start a postdoc at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and then continued on as a Hubble Fellow. Last year she moved across the country to begin life as a professor at RIT and is excited to be combining her enthusiasm for both research and teaching there. Her hobbies include watching and reading science fiction, reading other novels and non-fiction books, fitness when she finds the time, and spending time with her two cats.

Introducing Henry Ngo

Henry Ngo is a fourth year graduate student in Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He is interested in exoplanets—planets that orbit around other stars. In particular, he studies systems that host “hot Jupiters”, a type of gas giant planet that orbits very very close to the host star. These orbits are so small that one trip around their Sun is less than a week. They beg the question: how did the planets end up on such strange orbits? Henry’s research involves using the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to look for additional stars in hot Jupiter systems to determine whether these extra stars have something to do with the hot Juptiers’ strange orbits.

Henry grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and graduated with a BSc in Physics & Astronomy at the University of British Columbia in 2010, where he enjoyed the nice weather and the rain. He then moved to Ontario to pursue a Masters degree in Astronomy at Queen’s University where he experienced the harsh Canadian winters for the first time. He is glad that Caltech is in sunny Pasadena, but does miss the rain. His hobbies include softball and cooking: his latest project is mastering macarons. He normally tweets as @AstroDino.

Intoducing Nicholas Heavens

Nicholas (“Nick”) G. Heavens is Research Assistant Professor of Planetary Science at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. He grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and then received a B.S. in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago . He then went on to graduate school at Caltech  in Pasadena, California, where he received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Planetary Science . After receiving his Ph.D., he moved to Ithaca, New York to be a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Earth and Atmospheric SciencesEarth and Atmospheric Sciences . In 2012, he moved to Hampton University.

Nick works at the intersection of planetary science, meteorology, and historical geology. He studies the role of aerosols and clouds in the weather and climate of approximately round planets with atmospheres (otherwise there’s no point). His current activities include: (1) studying how Martian dust storms work; (2) developing fancy cloud modeling techniques for Mars; (3) understanding the role of atmospheric escape in the early history of Mars/Earth/Venus/Titan-like planets; (4) investigating the Earth’s climate 300 million years ago; and (5) baking with buckwheat.  He is on the board of STEPPE, an organization that promotes study of the Earth’s ancient sedimentary crust. He gratefully acknowledges funding from NSF and NASA. You can follow him on Twitter as @WeatherOnMars.