Congrats Dr. Long!

Yesterday our very own Joseph Long ascended the hallowed steps of academia and become a PhD holder! The PhD defense at Steward begins with a 30 min public talk summarizing your thesis (summarize 5-6 years of work in 30 mins????), followed by a snake fight with just the committee, who then kick you out to decide your fate. Reception to follow in the venerated “Interaction Area” at Steward, the area in which we interact.

I am actually in California right now doing an internship at NASA Ames for the next 6 months. But Joseph is pretty much my best grad school friend and I have a lot of airline miles, so I hopped a quick flight for the festivities.

There’s the Catalinas in the window

The Public Talk

It was standing room only (not just because the only room he could reserve was too small…) as the audience sat in rapt attention for Giant Planets, Sirius, and Starlight Subtraction At Scale.

Not a Joseph joint without the fizzies
The plot every exoplanet talk is required by law to show.
Time to get Sirius
Joseph’s aesthetic and vital GUI interface for MagAO-X
Diffraction gif but make it cats.
A certain member of Joseph’s committee is well known for his love of orange Fanta at the telescope.

The Celebration

Of course he passed! While the OpSci grads get lovely sashes, a certain Steward postdoc-turned-faculty Kevin Hainline pioneered a slightly sillier tradition for Steward grads: an elaborate crown and cape featuring highlights of their research. If you follow this blog, you are well aware of the craftiness of some of our group members. So the troops were mobilized into action in true XWCL spirit (with heavy consultation with Kevin).

The cape is an astronomy fabric with gold letters (Avalon-printed) and plots from his papers with logos he made as well. The crown has a circus flair, and features bells on the ends, with a dumpster (I mean a MagAO-X with one too few doors on the top, oops) as the center feature. Around the base of the crown are hand-drawn (Eden-drawn) animals from the mission patches Joseph designed, each with their own crowns. Jialin also made some incredible art of Joseph, to be featured below.

The encrowning and encapening

The ‘fit

cork poppin’
Cheers
Jared’s first astronomy PhD student. He’s had all OpSci grad before this.
Three generations! Laird was Jared’s advisor.
Ewan Douglas was also a committee member. The other two joined remotely.

Joseph’s ‘rents! Two Drs Long + Dr. Capt. Mrs. Marta L. Gwinn-Long (Ret.) M.D. M.P.H.

I didn’t really get any pictures of the food! Jay Keuny’s partner Mel made incredible focaccia bread, Jay made amazing pistachio macarons, Maggie brought a lovely pie, and Jialin brought fun Asian flavor chips!

Behind the scenes

The crown begins

Eden’s amazing crowned animals
The cape begins

Avalon’s amazing craft skills on the letters

Jialin’s Joseph-inspired art projects

Bonus crafts

Jialin made some incredible Joseph art:

Noodle Chef Joseph
Jester Joseph. Check out the pineapple and space cats lurking in the cards.

As a congrats gift, I made as Business Viscacha, or Businesscacha, or Biscacha. Behold Bizzy Biscacha:

He’s got some serious viscacha business to get to.

The briefcase opens and there are little letters in there 😀

Bizzy in his new home, attendin’ to business.

The Future

This summer Joseph is moving to New York City to begin a postdoc software fellowship at the Flatiron Institute. He’ll still be active with MagAO-X so keep an eye on this blog to follow his adventures.


The song of the day is HAPPY!

Congratulations Dr. Alex Hedglen!

On Friday, April 14th Alexander Hedglen went from learner to master. Passing his PhD defense, he will go on to work for Northrop Grumman Corp in Rolling Meadows, IL. Alex has been the top optomechanical student for XWCL for the past six years! His projects range from designing telescope simulators to 3″ triplets to crazy mounting schemes for deformable mirrors.

Alex in action: fabricating a part in Chile
Alex in front of open MagAO-X in Las Campanas cleanroom before First Light (2019)

Alex and I started working for Laird back in 2017. I will greatly miss his mentorship and guidance. We have spent long hours in the lab aligning optics, gluing optics, and phasing the GMT segments on HCAT. He has taught me so much about optomechanical engineering and how to make some darn good presentation figures.

Alex and I in “break” room at Las Campanas

We wish Alex, Kateri, Ezra, Clover, and Callie the best of luck on their journey!

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Alex and me working on phasing the High Contrast Adaptive-optics Testbed (HCAT)

Song of the Day

Behold: Alexander T. Rodack, Ph.D

Alexander T. Rodack began the day as any ordinary graduate student: tired, depressed, and wondering when, if ever, it will end? Well Alex, today is that day.

Welcome to having a doctorate from the College of Optical Sciences! I’m sure everyone who attended your dissertation defense thoroughly enjoyed your talk. And for those that weren’t present, I hope you post the recording somewhere for them to be amazed by the fruits of your labor (if they can understand what you’ve done, of course).

School’s out! Now go on and get to work at Raytheon!

Congratulations to Dr. Jennifer Lumbres!

The city of Tucson was made brighter today with the passing of Jhen’s PhD defense and a much-deserved level up. A huge round of applause for Dr. Lumbres!

Jhen’s talk was very comprehensive regarding her various projects she’s taken on during her time here at UArizona. If you’re like me, you learned a lot about the intricacies of Fresnel propagation and the problems that laser guide stars can solve. It was pretty surreal to me being that the last time I attended one of her talks was at the 2020 OpSci Winter School event when I was but a mere crouton in the world of optics and astronomy.

Moving forward, she’ll be relocating to sunny Los Angeles to work for Northrop-Grumman as an optical engineer and resident chocolatier early next year.

Salamat, Jhen! That’s a fancy Tagalog term that roughly translates to “may your hunts be fruitful and your arrows fly swift.” Or something like that. On second thought I think it just means thanks. We’ll miss you! (and your treats..!)

Song of the Day

Zweetkamertje—or—Congratulations Dr. Van Gorkom!

Our Dutch postdoc Sebastiaan Haffert has taught us many important terms (like “We at Toilet Duck recommend Toilet Duck!”), but the one most relevant today is zweetkamertje. As explained by Atlas Obscura, this is the “sweating room” where Ph.D. candidates in Leiden await the results of their doctoral exams.

This draft is being written (in part) during the sweating period of Kyle Van Gorkom’s Ph.D. defense.

But let’s back up a bit: Today, a pandemic-appropriate number of masked people filed in to Meinel 812 (and a much larger people joined online) to see Kyle Van Gorkom defend his Ph.D. research in adaptive optics. The view was excellent, but Jhen and Daewook had eyes only for Kyle.

Some pretty sweet mountains, you might say.

Mr. Van Gorkom (as he was then known) regaled us with tales of deformable mirror characterization and modeling. Battles won, vibrational modes damped, etc. (We will not talk about the IrisAO.)

The room was then closed for the committee to thoroughly examine him. We waited. Some of us blogged. Then, after some ritual hazing questioning, he was presented to us: Dr. Kyle Van Gorkom, Ph.D.!

A toast was called for.

The final test of the candidate is whether they can open a bottle of champagne. We are happy to report that he passed this as well, despite Susana’s evident skepticism.

And, after some initial difficulties, a toast was had! Congratulations, Dr. Kyle Van Gorkom!

Song of the Day

“Someday” by The Strokes