Introducing Zach Pace

Zach Pace (@zpacefromspace) just finished the third year of his PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Buffalo, NY, Zach received a B.S. in Physics and a B.A. in Mathematics from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2014. His research interests include galaxy evolution, chemical enrichment histories, and stellar populations. He works with data from the SDSS-IV MaNGA survey, an integral-field spectroscopic program that will produce spectral maps of 10,000 nearby galaxies by 2020. He is an avid, daily programmer, and an avowed machine-learning enthusiast.

Zach is also interested in scientific education and outreach. He regularly gives public presentations and telescope sessions at state parks around Wisconsin, through the Universe in the Park program. He served from 2014-2016 as Vice-Chair of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, USA (SEDS-USA), an organization of nearly 50 college and university chapters dedicated to public engagement, career development, and science literacy. When not doing astronomy, Zach is often found reading, homebrewing, sailing, or playing pub quizzes (usually not simultaneously).

Reintroducing Ángel R. López-Sánchez

Dr. Ángel R. López-Sánchez is an astronomer and science communicator at the Australian Astronomical Observatory and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Macquarie University. He studies how gas is converted into stars in nearby galaxies and how this affects galaxy evolution. He also provides support for visiting astronomers to the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT, Siding Spring Observatory, NSW). Dr. López-Sánchez is passionate science communicator who continuously gives talks and public lectures, writes popular science articles and organizes stargazing activities. He is very active in social media, his Twitter feed is @El_Lobo_Rayado.

Reintroducing Chris Lintott

Chris Lintott is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, where he leads the team of people responsible for the Zooniverse.org collection of citizen science projects. Volunteers have used the Zooniverse to classify galaxies, discover planets (and perhaps but probably not an alien megastructure), catch supernovae and do a lot of non-astronomical things too. His own research is on galaxy evolution and formation, mostly using data from Galaxy Zoo to think about what changes star formation in galaxies. His background is a little closer to home, having completed a PhD at University College London mostly on the chemistry of star formation; he’s a big fan of triply-deuterated ammonia but likes sulphur compounds the best.

Chris is best known (in the UK at least) as the co-presenter of the BBC long-running Sky at Night program, a monthly look at the worlds of astronomy and astrophysics. This has taken him to all sorts of places, including the control room for ESA’s Rosetta mission which ends this week. He also once got the age of the Universe wrong on camera by a factor of a million. Away from research, Chris answers email. Away from email, he can be found cooking, watching theatre or opera or shouting loudly at the Chicago Fire and Torquay United. He also plays real tennis, which is far superior to the young upstart lawn tennis.

Most other days, you can find Chris on twitter at @chrislintott

Introducing Abhijeet Borkar

I did my B.Sc. from the Fergusson College, Pune, India in 2010, M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Pune, Pune, India, with specialization in Quantum Field Theory. After that I went for PhD at the University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany, as a part of the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR). I recently completed my PhD in November 2015, and will soon start my first post-doc position at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic.

For my masters’ thesis, I worked on the modelling of the gas distribution in local dwarf galaxies and relating the star formation rates with the gas distribution. My PhD thesis was about the observations of the Galactic Center at 3 mm to study the flaring activity of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and the study of the stellar SiO maser sources in the central parsec region. My research interests include the Galactic Center region, the AGN-host relation & Evolution, Cosmic Archaeology, Formation of first objects in the Universe (First Stars, First Galaxies, First Black Holes), Radio Interferometry etc.

I am also fairly active in public outreach in India, where I have been involved with the Astro Club at the Fergusson College, Pune. Currently involved in activities related to improving science awareness among students in parts of rural India.

You can find me on Twitter at @borkarabhijeet

Introducing Jennifer Johnson

Dr. Jennifer Johnson is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at Ohio State University. She studies the formation and evolution of the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies and the origin of the elements. Her favorite element is arsenic, followed closely by ytterbium. Jennifer is currently the Spokesperson of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and is particularly involved in the @APOGEEsurvey of the compositions and motions of hundreds of thousands of Milky Way stars. She should really be writing the Data Release 13 paper right now.

Jennifer grew up as a Foreign Service brat in Arlington, Virginia, Prague, Czechoslovakia, Trindid and Tobago, and Bonn, West Germany. She received her B.A. in physics at Carleton College and her Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. Her PhD with Mike Bolte focused on deriving ages for stars using the radioactive element thorium, and she continues to try and guess the ages and masses of stars. After postdoctoral fellowships at @CarnegieAstro in Pasadena and at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victora, British Columbia, Jennifer moved to Columbus, Ohio to join the faculty at Ohio State. She is one of the tweeters from the @sdssurveys and @APOGEEsurvey accounts as well as tweeting personally as @jajohnson51.

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 Jane Rigby

This week’s Astrotweeps host is Jane Rigby. Jane is an astrophysicist whose research focuses on the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time, the growth of supermassive black holes, and spectroscopic diagnostics. Jane is a civil servant at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, DC. She serves as a Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope.

She was an organizer of Inclusive Astronomy 2015, and serves on the American Astronomical Society’s Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA).

Jane has given numerous public lectures, at venues including TEDxMidAtlantic and the Library of Congress. She has blogged for AstroBetter and Las Campanas Belles.

She lives in Maryland with her wife and their preschooler. Her website is JaneRigby.net and she normally tweets at @janerrigby.