Science Stuff

This is me with Chris Gottbrath, one of the other students in an NSF program I was in during the summer of '94 at NOAO, in Tucson AZ. We're up on Kitt Peak, near Tucson, next to the Schmidt telescope. The 90-inch and the 2-meter are visible in the background. You can see that the dark clouds and rainbow don't bode well for observing, but the sunset was nice.

I'm a new planetary science grad student here at LPL...still trying to figure out people's names, where to go, what classes to take, and how to get the university to give me my fellowship money. :-) I'm interested in planetary surfaces and interiors, and am planning to work on interpreting Galileo spacecraft data from the moons of Jupiter.

I'm currently funded by a NASA Spacegrant fellowship...check out their pages as well. There's also a page with the 1995-96 graduate fellows, with a horrible picture of me.

As part of the Spacegrant fellowship, I've been working with the Galileo Solid State Imaging (SSI) team at NOAO, writing educational modules. I'm primarily interested in developing the satellite science goals and adapting them for classroom use. A preliminary version of the first of my educational modules is available on the SEPO (SSI Education and Public Outreach) page at JPL.

There's even a picture with me in it on the SSI team page!

Here's a page of interesting Voyager images of the Galilean satellites, from an unorganized NASA archive...a little rough, but interesting nonetheless.

I recently went to the Nevada test site and got irradiated. For the whole story, see the test site trip page.

I graduated from Harvard in June of 1995, majoring in Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics, with an interest in Earth & Planetary Sciences: Solid Earth Geophysics. Since I'm interested in planetary science, which is an interdisciplinary field involving astronomy, geology, and physics, I attempted to combine the three fields above.

My senior thesis at Harvard involved studying Anomalous Low-Emissivity Impact Crater Related Features on Venus, from Magellan Radar data. Here are a couple links to data relevant to my thesis. First, there's the official Magellan Mission Homepage at JPL. I studied impact craters, and here's a picture of one of the craters I've spent hours poring over, Crater Carson.