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During my time at the CfA and the University of Washington, I've had the pleasure of advising and mentoring a great group of students. Read on to learn more about what we worked on together, and where they are now...


Angie Wolfgang

Angie Wolfgang participated in the 2008 Smithsonian Observatory Internship Program, working with Paul Green and I to provide a uniform classification of the stellar content of the Chandra Multi-wavelength Project's spectroscopic database. After measuring spectral types for each of those stars, Angie investigated if coronal and chromospheric emission track one another well or diverge for the most X-ray active stars.

In the fall, Angie returned to Cornell University, where she is a senior physics major with a concentration in education. Her research interests include star formation, exoplanets, and other near-field astronomy, and she is working with James Lloyd and Jason Wright to analyze the open star cluster Ruprecht 147 in order to understand the age-activity relation for late type stars. Angie is also very interested in science education, science writing, and public outreach.

Kacey Abaraoha

Kacey and I worked together over the course of the 2007-2008 academic year, where I served as her thesis advisor on a project to identify rotating young stars in multi-epoch data from the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES). Analyzing data from a TrES field located in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, Kacey identified a sample of stars which showed periodic variability, as expected for young stars with large sunspots, and which also had photometric and kinematic properties consistent with those of previously known members of Taurus.

Kacey obtained spectra for a number of these candidate members from the FAST spectrograph on Mt. Hopkins. Analysis of these spectra revealed one object with H alpha emission and lithium absorption, indicative of an active pre-main sequence star. Kacey also examined Spitzer Space Telescope data, provided in advance of publication by the Taurus Legacy Project, which indicates that this star may host a `transition disk', or a circumstellar disk with an inner gap being cleared out by the formation of planets.

In recognition of the quality of her thesis work and her promise in astronomical research, Kacey was awarded the Goldberg prize by the Harvard Astronomy Department. She is currently a working as a Program Manager for the Windows Live Mesh group at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and is keeping in touch with astronomy by adapting her thesis for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Eric Baxter

As a participant in the Summer 2007 Smithsonian Observatory Internship Program, Eric worked with Gus Muench and I to measure the projected rotation velocities of young stars in NGC 2264 from Doppler broadening of their spectral features. Combining his vsini measurements with independent measurements of the temperature, luminosity, and rotation period of each star, Eric generated a distance dependent estimate of each star's inclination. After carefully accounting for the uncertainties in each parameter, Eric determined the distance at which NGC 2264's inclination distribution most resembled that expected for a collection of stars with randomly oriented rotation axes. Eric's distance determination, d~860pc, places NGC 2264 more distant than previous estimates by ~10%, with important implications for the luminosities and ages of the cluster members. At the January 2008 AAS meeting, Eric received an honorable mention for the Chambiss medal recognizing exemplary student research; he is currently preparing a draft of his work for submission to the Astronomical Journal.

Jim Davenport

Jim Davenport Headshot

Jim and I started working together during the spring of 2005, when Jim was learning to use IDL to do 3-dimensional visualization. The following summer, I was Jim's TA for the advanced undergraduate summer observing class, where he observed field M stars with measured trigonometric parallaxes in the SDSS and Johnson-Cousins filter sets. Over the course of the next year, Jim worked with Andrew West, Suzanne Hawley and I to reduce and analyze that data, ultimately publishing his calibrated color-magnitude diagrams and color-transformations in two papers: "Sloan/Johnson-Cousins/2MASS Color Transformations for Cool Stars" (Davenport et al. 2006 PASP 118 1679) and "Improved Photometric Calibrations for Red Stars Observed with the SDSS Photometric Telescope" (Davenport et al. 2007 AJ 134 2403).

While at the University of Washington, Jim also re-energized the on-campus, undergraduate-led Palen Radio Observatory, and worked at Apache Point Observatory on engineering projects and as an observing assistant. Jim is now pursuing graduate studies in Astronomy at the San Diego State University, where he is studying the internal structure and mass segregation of open clusters by applying matched filter techniques on SDSS data; for more detail's, see Jim Davenport's home page.