Outreach and Public Facing Science
JWST for Students: Hands-on JWST Data Data Reduction and Analysis by Undergraduates
I am coordinating a cohort of undergraduates who have installed and run JWST data reduction pipelines based on the TEMPLATES ERS cookbooks and guides, which include significant post-pipeline processing steps to clean residual artifacts. The students will publish what they learned in "JWST For Beginners" guides that will be released by the TEMPLATES ERS team.
This work is funded by the Ohio Space Grant Consortium for the 2023-2024 academic year with a Student-Innovative-Creative-Hands-On-Project (SICHOP) grant.
I haven't been able to watch it myself, because who likes the sound of their own voice? Let me know how it came out.
A press release about my paper measuring X-ray emission from a strongly lensed star-forming galaxy at "Cosmic Noon".
(and a few others links: The Boston Globe, Astronomy.com, SciNews). Yes, I find this photo embarassing.
As a graduate student, I spent one year as the lead instructor for Space Explorers, a program that was run out of the Office of Special Programs at the University of Chicago. For one year I taught a 2 hour class every Saturday morning for Chicago middle school and high school students. Space Explorers also included annual summer and winter institutes for the students at Yerkes Observatory, and I was an instructor at 8 of these institutes between 2006 and 2011. My experience with Space Explorers was transformative and instilled a deep appreciation for the value of immersive, hands-on educational programs that prioritize students asking questions and exploring ways to answer those questions themselves.
