2021 Research

Over the Summer of 2021, I worked as a Sarles Research Fellow as part of Amherst College's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. I conducted research under faculty mentors Professor Kate Follette and Dr. Connor Robinson. During my time as a Sarles Fellow, I worked with a database of known, actively accreting objects named the Comprehensive Archive of subStellar and Planetary Accretion Rates (CASPAR). My work focused primarily on obtaining the most up-to-date information regarding the physical properties of the celestial objects found in the database using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) archive. Gaia's EDR3 archive provides information regarding stellar properties such as RA, Declination, Proper Motion, and Parallax, and was released in December of 2020. I also used Python to analyze the data, inform of any relationships between properties, and create graphics that help to provide context and intuition regarding the mass accretion rates of the objects in the CASPAR database. The CASPAR database is still under development and has not been released to the general public at this time.

Check Out Some of The Data Visualizations I Made over the Course of My Research!