Fall 2008

News of my new NASA research grant made the front page of the UAB Reporter on Sept. 29th. Doug White and I also made the UAB reporter that same day for some comments about the Large Hadron Collider.

Spring 2008

Chrissy Richey won 1st place in her session at the Graduate Student Research Days at UAB in February 2008.

Fall 2007

Chrissy Richey attended the 2007 AAS Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Orlando, FL (hence the mouse ears).

Summer 2007

Peter Mares, an REU student from Cornell University, worked with graduate student Christina Richey and myself on the UV photolysis of interstellar and planetary ices. The photo on the left shows Peter and myself posing working hard in the lab. Peter's REU poster presentation won first place this year! Pramesh Singh also joined as a new graduate student in the Astrophysics Group. Pictured on the left are (from left to right) Peter Mares, Christina Richey, Christa Labadorf, and Pramesh Singh.

Spring 2007

Doug White (pictured) and I attended the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, WA in Jan 2007. I met up with a dozen or so alumni from RPI at the 209th AAS meeting in Seattle. (Jan 2007)

Summer 2006

Vestavia Physics Teacher Martina Norton worked in the Astrophysics Laboratory as part of the Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Program at UAB during July 2006.

Fall 2005

In October 2005, Erik Saperstein successfully defended his Master's Thesis work [PDF, 1.8Mb]. Congratulations, Erik!

Summer 2005

Charlotte McFarland, an REU student from Tufts University, worked with graduate student David Alvarez and myself on the time-of-flight mass spectrometer system to measure organics inside icy surfaces such as those on Europa. I also advised REU student Eliah Kagan, who worked with Dr. Robert Mohr on the computer simulation of interstellar icy grain mantle photolysis. Eliah will be presenting his work at the January 2006 meeting of the American Astronomical Socitey. This summer, physics graduate student Doug White joined the Astrophysics group. Doug will be studying the behavior of the solid CO2 absorption feature near λ = 15µm in laboratory ices under various conditions that are relevant to environments probed by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Summer 2004

Vernon Chaplin, an REU student from Swarthmore College, worked with me this summer on an observational astrophysics project in which we studied the properties of dust in the interstellar high-latitude cloud complex MBM18-19. Have a look at a PDF file containing Vernon's poster by clicking here or on the image (103kb). In other news, Christina Richey (see "Summer 2003") has joined our group as a new Ph.D. student.

Summer 2003

High-School Intern Raven Underwood (left) and REU student Christina Richey (right, from Wheeling Jesuit University). Christina and Raven performed more UV photolysis experiments, this time on mixtures of H2O+CO2 (1:1). You can see Christina's poster here. Christina won first place for Physical Sciences in the UAB REU poster session!

Summer 2002

This summer, we had two REU students working in the Astrophysics Laboratory: Amanda Cook (an undergraduate Astrophysics major from Connecticut College) and Jennifer Bray (a UAB Physics major). Amanda continued the UV photolysis work where Kyle left off last year, creating photolyzed ice samples to simulate icy surfaces in the outer Solar System and in cometary nuclei. Jennifer worked on the time-of-flight mass spectrometer system that is being developed here as a proof-of-concept model for instruments that should be sent to the surface of Europa in order to analyze the chemical composition of its surface ices. Both Jennifer and Amanda presented posters describing their summer work at the 34th Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences that was held in Birmingham 6-11 October 2002. Jefferson County International Baccalauriate High School student Ben Retan (pictured in the photo from the March 17th edition of the UAB Reporter newspaper) worked in the UAB Astrophysics Laboratory in the summer of 2002 as part of the Research Experiences for High School Students (REHSS) Program. He later presented his work at the Birmingham District high school science fair, where he won placement in the international competition.

Summer 2001

In the summer of 2001, two students worked with me on research projects in the laboratory. Their research ultimately led to an abstract at the 2001 American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting entitled, "Simulation of the processing of icy interstellar grains in interstellar clouds: UV photolysis of a laboratory model". Ralph Pippen (left) -- then a junior from Holy Family High School, worked as part of the Alabama Heritage Center's project SEED. Project SEED places high school students in real-life research settings as educational experiences, and the students get paid for it as well. Kyle Harman (right), an undergraduate Physics major at UAB, worked as part of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. Kyle's poster presentation of his summer REU research won 1st place this year!