Kepler & K2
The Kepler/K2 Guest Observer Office has four new members joining us at Ames Research Center in California: Michael Gully-Santiago, Ann Marie Cody, Christina Hedges, and Zé Vinícius.
Ann Marie Cody earned her PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 2011, where she investigated the properties of young brown dwarfs and low-mass stars using time series photometry and spectroscopy. Ann Marie will take a leading role in supporting the stellar astrophysics community mine the rich star clusters K2 has observed in recent Campaigns. She will also organize a K2 Cluster Science Workshop, and help PI's deliver value-added High Level Science Products to the data archive.
Michael Gully-Santiago earned his PhD at the University of Texas in Austin in 2015 where he developed innovative technologies for and observational studies of star and planet formation. Gully will take a leading role in supporting the K2 Supernova Cosmology Experiment and helping our community leverage modern data science methods.
Christina Hedges recently submitted her PhD at the University of Cambridge in the UK, researching exoplanet transmission spectroscopy using the Hubble Space Telescope and mining the K2 data using machine learning methods. Christina will take a leading role in supporting our exoplanet and asteroseismology communities.
Zé Vinícius is an intern from the University of Campina Grande in Brazil, where he is studying towards an Electrical Engineering degree. Last year Zé implemented PSF photometry for the AstroPy/photutils project as part of a Google Summer of Code project. Zé will take a leading role in helping the GO office and the community produce high-quality open source software tools and perform photometry in crowded fields.
Zé started on March 1st, Michael and Ann Marie started on May 31st, and Christina will join us at the end of June.
Together, the team will embark on an ambitious plan to leave behind a rich set of community-oriented data products, tools, and tutorials to help current and future astronomers extract the best possible science from Kepler and K2's unique legacy data sets.