Here's a sampling of articles I've written!
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Planetary Debris Disks Discovered with Citizen Scientists and Virtual Reality — A new discovery of a strange debris disk, but with unique methods: citizen science and virtual reality!
Ukrainian Astronomers Discover "Exocomets" Around Another Star — A news story featuring a recent discovery of exocomets around nearby Beta Pictoris from a group of Ukrainian astronomers, and how that discovery fits into both the larger story of that star and our growing knowledge about exocomets. Record-Breaking Supernova Is Part of a New Class of Objects — News highlighting a recent discovery of the brightest "Cow-like" supernova yet, published in Scientific American. |
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Striving to see the high-energy sky with STROBE-X -- A feature-length article for the May/June 2022 Issue of SPIE Photonics Focus, telling the story of STROBE-X, a proposed probe-class mission to observe the Universe in X-rays. |
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An Unusual Orbit: The Life and Discoveries of Carolyn Shoemaker — An essay about the life and science of astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker, published in APS News The Back Page as the winner of the 2021 APS History of Physics Essay Contest. |
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Andrea Ghez and the Mysteries of the Galactic Center — The feature article for the 2020-2021 UCLA Physics & Astronomy "Reflections" Year in Review, my department's annual report. Featuring the Nobel-winning work by Andrea Ghez and collaborators, as well as information on the exciting, groundbreaking science her group is working on now!
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Where are the moons that orbit exoplanets? — A fun explainer all about EXOMOONS: why they're cool, how we find them, and what we've found so far. |
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Dark horses in the cosmos: Could primordial black holes from the beginning of time explain ‘dark matter’, the mysterious missing mass in the Universe? — A longer deep dive into the history and current prospects of primordial black holes, the underdog candidate for dark matter. |
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Home is Wherever I Am — A personal essay with my thoughts on moving in academia, the changes of working-from-home during the pandemic, and how we define what "home" is, published on The Xylom.
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Where is Everyone? — some musings on the Fermi Paradox and our technological adolescence for The Orbiter Mag (originally written at ComSciCon Flagship 2019!) |
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My article Life in the Universe (Within Our Lifetimes) won 3rd place in the 8th annual Joan and Arthur Seidel Griffith Observer Writing Contest in 2020. It was published in the July 2021 issue of the Griffith Observer magazine. You can read it here. |
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Stellar impostors could be revealed by LIGO — Written for the NASW Student Newsroom, this piece explores bizarre "zombie"-like stars and how we may be able to learn more about them with gravitational waves.
Historical records reveal major space weather events — Coverage of the 2022 AAAS meeting for the NASW Student Newsroom, highlighting work from the session on space weather. Edited and mentored by Alex Witze. How (and why) to pitch a story that happened 100 years ago — Coverage of the ScienceWriters2021 meeting for the NASW Student Newsroom. Also published in the Winter/Spring 2022 issue of NASW ScienceWriters magazine! |
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The Last Stargazers takes an intimate view of the world through telescopes — A review of Prof. Emily Levesque's pop sci book, a romp through the world of observational astronomy called The Last Stargazers.
#BlackInAstro founder Ashley Walker is fighting for equality in the space sciences — A lab note (short article) for Massive Science, highlighting the work of astrochemist Ashley Walker. NASA's Perseverance Rover has landed on Mars — Live coverage of the exciting Perseverance landing on 2/18! |
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Three Astronomers' Thoughts on The Milky Way by Dr. Moiya McTier — In this fun co-authored article, I wrote a review of Dr. Moiya McTier's incredible new pop sci book, an autobiography of the Milky Way.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020: Andrea Ghez — An article celebrating one of this year’s astronomical awardees for the Nobel Prize in Physics, Prof. Andrea Ghez! Let's dive into the mysteries of the Galactic Center from this awesome UCLA group. #BlackInAstro: A Glimpse Into African Cultural Astronomy — Humans have been looking up for our entire history, so let’s take a look at the women of indigenous African communities and their relationship to the night sky. This piece is part of Astrobites' #BlackInAstro series, highlighting the experiences and research of Black astronomers. A New Job for a Neural Net — Identifying Craters! — one of my earliest Astrobites. Finding craters is a pesky problem – so let’s outsource it to machine learning! All Genders Are Statistically Significant: Expanding Gender Equity Studies in Astronomy -- Many studies have been done within astronomy to investigate gender inequality between men and women. But, what can we do to better support the members of our community who don’t identify as part of the gender binary? Thinking Beyond ADA Compliance: How to Make Astronomy Accessible — When we think about access, we may think of ramps or other physical accommodations – but what more can we do to ensure that astronomy is truly accessible to everyone in our community? This Astro2020 white paper delves into what’s not working, and what we can do to improve. Another interstellar interloper — A few years ago, an asteroid visited our solar system…in December 2019, a comet from a different star visited, too! You can see the rest of my Astrobites articles here! |