Resident pyramid expert Dr. Lauren Schatz defended her thesis work today, despite pandemic pandemonium. The field has decided to accept her (with minor revisions), and she will be joining the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico later this year.
We’ll miss her a lot, but every wavefront sensed by MagAO-X will have her fingerprints on it. Well, not literally, that’d be bad optical science-ing. But you know what I mean.
We had all kind-of forgotten how to do the in-person rituals of academia, but we “reserved” a “conference room” and used a “projector.” We also set up Zoom, for good measure (and for everyone beyond the tiny occupancy limit imposed by These Unprecedented Times).
Masks were worn by all non-presenters, fear not.
Best wishes in all your future endeavors, Lauren!
Drs. Schatz and Males post-defense. The women of Optics make sashes to commemorate defenses, and this one was made by Dr. Silvana Ayala.
Song of the Day
You’ll find in time All the answers that you seek Have been sitting there just waiting to be seen Take away your pride and take away your grief And you’ll finally be right where you need to be
“Different Now” by Chastity Belt
Bonus Lauren
Have you ever unpacked a new optic and it turns out it was actually Lauren? (Photo: Jennifer Lumbres)
The school year has wrapped up and we’re about to head into summer. Usually we’re excited we survived the year at all, but this time we are celebrating the XWCL undergraduates graduating and completing their bachelor’s degrees! Chris, Maggie, and Madison have worked with us for the past couple years assisting on MagAO-X.
Chris joined us in 2016 as a computer science undergrad. He started working with Katie doing data reduction. Jared then poached him away to work a lot in the lab doing mostly hardware coding and is the original Basler camera whisperer. He is going to stick around with us for a few weeks to wrangle some more hardware control programming before journeying off to a real job with Fast Enterprises.
Congratulations, Chris!
Maggie joined us in 2017 as an optical sciences and engineering undergrad. She’s worked primarily with Laird on MagAO-X optomechanical design and alignment. She came along with us to SPIE last year and is part inventor with Laird on the optomechanical mount patent. She will be suffering sticking around with us this fall at UA for a PhD in optical sciences, where she will also be an NSF GRFP recipient. She is off to a summer internship in Baltimore at STScI working on HiCAT.
Maggie with Laird at the Optical Sciences commencement
Madison joined us in 2018 as an optical sciences and engineering undergrad. She worked with us part time last summer to help Lauren with the MagAO-X pyramid wfs alignment and joined us for the past school year doing quantum efficiency testing for a light source. She will be partially suffering sticking around this fall at UA for a MS in optical sciences. She is off to a summer internship in Boston at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Madison with Jhen and Lauren at the Optical Sciences commencement
The MagAO-X PI has expressed an interest in the return of having a song with the blog posts. With the help of Joseph, we have a graduation-themed song for EACH of the undergrads:
For Chris, we have “Shut Up and Let Me Go” by the Ting Tings:
For Maggie, we have “Move On Up” by Curtis Mayfield:
For Madison, we have “Take Yourself With You” by Rose Linor Dougall:
Also, as tradition with the blog, here are quotes. The MagAO-X PI has some parting words for the graduating undergrads:
Jared: You’re here until you die* *Source: “Look Down (Prisoners)” from Les Miserables
Congratulations again to the undergrads, XWCL is super proud of all the hard work you’ve done! Here’s to a fun and productive summer for everyone!
This is a late post, but on November 16, 2018, Kelsey Miller successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation! Congratulations, Dr. Miller!
Kelsey and her Ph.D. Committee – Olivier, Jared, and Michael
Kelsey’s research is on Linear Dark Field Control (LDFC), a focal plane wavefront sensing technique where she monitors the bright field speckles and uses their linear nature to maintain stability in the dark hole. She has been developing LDFC using the MagAO-X pupil and vAPP coronagraph design. You can learn more about Kelsey’s work in LDFC (JATIS, arXiv) and how LDFC will work with MagAO-X (SPIE, arXiv).
Kelsey is off to cooler climates at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, who have been our collaborators with the vAPP coronagraph. She will be a postdoctoral researcher with Frans Snik, continuing her work on LDFC to get it working on sky. We will miss you tremendously!
MagAO’s own Ya-Lin Wu defended his Ph.D. dissertation and is now Dr. Wu! Congrats Ya-Lin!
Dr. Wu and his happy advisor.
Ya-Lin has used MagAO to study planet formation in many ways, most recently combining VisAO data with ALMA data to study circum-planetary disks. Check out all of his papers on our Publications page.
Ya-Lin is now on his way to the University of Texas at Austin as a 51 Peg b fellow. Way to go.
We are very excited to announce that MagAO’s very own Kate Follette has been awarded a NASA Sagan Fellowship. Her proposal, “Finding and Characterizing Forming Protoplanets with Next-Generation Adaptive Optics Systems”, was one of just 6 selected this year. You’ll probably have guessed that “Next-Generation” AO systems includes our very own MagAO.
Kate’s Sagan project involves imaging baby planets with MagAO+VisAO’s H-alpha capability, and following up with the amazing Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). You can read all about Kate’s project in this pdf.
Here’s Kate on her way up to the telescopes at LCO. Way to go Kate!
Dr Follette hard at work driving VisAO.
Congratulations Kate, and welcome to the Sagan Fellows family!
