people | cool worlds

David Kipping

I seek to understand our home's uniqueness in the universe. Our parent star, solar system, home planet and companion moon have all played a role in the story of how we came to be. My passion is to follow the trail of cosmic breadcrumbs left behind to reveal whether this story played out elsewhere across the ocean of stars. I try to think of new ways to extract information out of astronomical data and ways in which we can actually realize these ideas.

dkipping at astro.columbia.edu

Tiffany Jansen

I am a third-year graduate student in astronomy studying extrasolar planets in the Cool Worlds team. I'm particularly interested in the study of rocky planets orbiting within the temperate zone of their parent star, and developing the methods to study and characterize such planets.

jansent at astro.columbia.edu

Moiya McTier

I am a third-year graduate student here at Columbia broadly interested in galaxies and exoplanets. I am researching what could be possible with the next-generation of telescopes investigating exoplanets with some exciting prospects in the works. I also write science fiction and mythology novels in my spare time!

mmctier at astro.columbia.edu

Emily Sandford

I am a graduate student working on calibrating the properties of Kepler planet host stars using transit data. My previous research has focused on the accretion history of the Milky Way, from understanding the Milky Way's satellite galaxy population in a broader cosmological context to analyzing the dynamics of tidal streams in the Milky Way halo. More recently I have been investigating the use of machine learning techniques for exoplanetary science.

keywords: tidal streams, bayesian inference, transit modeling, information theory

esandford at astro.columbia.edu

Alex Teachey

I'm a fourth year graduate student working on the search for moons orbiting extrasolar planets. As an undergraduate, I worked alongside astronomers at the American Museum of Natural History and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, where my research was focused on the study of giant molecular clouds in the Milky Way using radio, near-infrared and gamma-ray observations. I'm an alumnus of CUNY Hunter College and was recently selected as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

ateachey at astro.columbia.edu

Adam Wheeler

I'm a second year graduate student at Columbia working on a project to discover additional examples of strange stars like Boyajian's Star, evaporating planets and lensed systems. I'm approaching this from a very data-oriented perspective and using techniques from signal processing to try and build an automatic pipeline that can handle large data volumes to search for these weird signals.

awheeler at astro.columbia.edu

Jorge Cortes

I'm a first year graduate student at Columbia. My main research interests are compact objects, late-stage stellar evolution and extrasolar planets. I recently finished a project calculating the detectability of exoplanets with the upcoming LSST survey, using methods such as injection/recovery tests to study completeness and sensitivity.

jorgecorte at astro.columbia.edu