Introducing Rachael Ainsworth

Rachael Ainsworth (@rachaelevelyn) is a Research Associate at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JBCA) at the University of Manchester. Her expertise lies in the interpretation of radio emission from protostellar systems in nearby star forming regions, particularly at very long (metre) wavelengths. Her primary research interests include astrophysical jets/outflows, star formation and evolution. She works on the Horizon 2020 RadioNET “Radio Interferometry Next Generation Software” (RINGS) project to develop software for calibrating dispersive delay corrections in long baseline radio interferometry for long wavelength telescopes such as the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR).

She is Open Science Champion for the Interferometry Centre of Excellence at JBCA, where she promotes, advocates and organises events relating to open science in astronomy. She is also a Mozilla Open Leader running the open project Resources for Open Science in Astronomy (ROSA), which aims to compile and tailor open science best practices from around the web into a toolkit for astronomers to work openly from proposal to publication. This project seeks input from the entire astronomy community, so feel to bookmark https://github.com/rainsworth/ROSA and become a contributor to the project in the coming weeks.

Rachael also organises the Manchester chapter of XX+Data (@xxplusdatamcr) – a community for women who work with and love data. The goal of the community is to bring together women with diverse expertise and experience to support one another, share experiences and talk data.

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Introducing Emily Sandford

Emily Sandford (@EmSandford) is a PhD student in the Cool Worlds lab at Columbia University. She uses planets to study stars, and she teaches computers how to recognize patterns in planetary transits. She has also worked on detecting dark matter using dissolving star clusters in the Milky Way. She writes for @Astrobites.

Introducing Benne Willem Holwerda

My name is Benne Willem Holwerda (@bennewillemholwerda). I have have started this year as an associate professor at the university of Louisville in Kentucky. My interests are dust in galaxies, galaxy evolution, our Milky Way in dwarf stars and the gas supply of galaxies over cosmic time.

Married, dad to ms C (7) and mr M (5).

Introducing Ben Montnet

Ben Montet (@benmontet) is a NASA Sagan Fellow at the University of Chicago. He works to find and characterize planets with Kepler and K2, and soon, the upcoming TESS mission. He also uses Kepler data to better understand stellar activity through observations of long-term brightness variations of stars. (Ask him about KIC 8462852, or “Boyajian’s Star.”)

Ben is originally from the Chicagoland area, receiving his BS from the University of Illinois before heading to sunny California for his PhD at Caltech. When he’s not in the office, he enjoys traveling, watching the Cubs, and exploring his old and new hometown of Chicago.