| HOME |
| VITA |
| RESEARCH |
| PUBLICATIONS |
| PEOPLE |
| TEACHING |
| WOMEN IN ASTRONOMY |
| CONTACT |
|
| NEWS FROM 2018 |
| Congratulations to Dr. Shrestha! |
| 2018 November 30 — My group hit another proud milestone earlier this year. In July, Ph.D. student Manisha Shrestha successfully defended her dissertation, entitled "Polarized bow shock nebulae reveal features of the winds and environments of massive stars"! Manisha's work focuses on simulating the polarization produced by light scattering in the cone-shaped shock regions produced by fast-moving stars with stellar winds. In addition to Manisha's local dissertation committee, we were joined by Dr. Richard Ignace of East Tennessee State University, who served as a guest committee member. Manisha is the third Ph.D. student to graduate from my group at DU. She will soon move to England to take a postdoctoral position at Liverpool John Moores University. We will miss her but look forward to many productive future collaborations! |
| Colliding wind binary project funded by NSF |
| 2018 July 15 — I'm excited to report that my recent NSF proposal on spectropolarimetric monitoring of WR + O binary systems has been funded! This project is a "multigenerational" collaboration with my Ph.D. advisor Dr. Ken Nordsieck and my recent Ph.D. advisee Dr. Jamie Lomax. It leverages the high-quality data we've been obtaining from the RSS instrument on the Southern African Large Telescope and will allow us to reconstruct the colliding wind structures of these massive binaries in unprecedented detail. We're also delighted to be working closely with Nicole St-Louis and Tony Moffat at U. de Montréal. Read the project abstract here: Collaborative Research: Asymmetry is Destiny: Structure and Fate of Wolf-Rayet Binary Systems |
| New opportunities |
| 2018 March 19 — Recent Ph.D. graduate Leah Huk is beginning a postdoctoral research associate position with the Chimera Computational Astrophysics Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This group uses some of the best supercomputers in the world to construct 3-D simulations of supernovae and neutron star mergers, so it's a great fit for Leah, who created radiative transfer simulations of supernovae for her Ph.D. research. I can't wait to hear what she accomplishes at ORNL! |
| Dr. Lomax will be Professor Lomax! |
| 2018 February 23 — Big news this month! My first Ph.D. advisee, Jamie Lomax, has accepted a faculty position in the Department of Physics at the U.S. Naval Academy. Jamie graduated in 2013 and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Washington. Her research focuses on mass loss from massive stars and protoplanetry and debris disks around newly forming stars. I'm delighted for this new phase of her career and know she will be a fantastic professor! |