For this effort, my research team and I develop data-rich classroom activities for undergraduate non-science majors that involve contributing to citizen science projects active on the Zooniverse platform. Students learn about topics at the forefront of current disciplinary research and immerse themselves in a variety of representations (charts, tables, figures) to better understand the process real scientists undergo when answering complex research questions. Labs have been completed on the topics of transiting exoplanets and climate change utilizing the Zooniverse projects Planet Hunters - TESS and Floating Forests, respectively. We are currently developing two additional activities with an emphasis on culturally responsive curricular development on the topics of Martian weather and climate (Planet Four) and gravitation waves (Gravity Spy). After the pilot testing phase is complete, these curricular materials will be available on the Zooniverse classroom page for public access.

This research effort is funded by a grant through the National Science Foundation - Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) track (Award #1821319).

In this effort, we are developing the first fully online research course for astronomy majors. Utilizing Exoplanet Watch (a high-level citizen science project through NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and DIY Planet Search (a tool built out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), our online students will be using robotic ground-based telescopes to take follow-up observations of large, previously-discovered exoplanets. Using the tools provided by Exoplanet Watch and DIY Planet Search, these students will update the orbital properties of these exoplanets, and post them to a well-renowned national database. These updated parameters will help future space-based missions (like JWST and ARIEL) observe these giant exoplanets more precisely to help scientists learn more about distant planet atmospheres.

This research effort is funded by a grant through the National Science Foundation - Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) track (Award #2121225).

We investigated college students’ conceptual and reasoning difficulties on the topic of planet formation pre-instruction. Through an analysis of over 1,000 responses to open-ended questions, we found that these students lack an understanding of fundamental topics in astronomy (e.g. gravity, basic definitions of a planet or solar system, mass versus density). The results from this analysis laid the foundation for the development of the Planet Formation Concept Inventory (PFCI), an educational research tool that can be used like a diagnostic test to assess students’ pre- and post-instructional knowledge. Using iterative design and statistical processes consistent with Classical Test Theory (CTT), we were able to confirm that the PFCI is a reliable and valid instrument that can be utilized to measure college students’ learning on the topic of planet formation over time.

We analyzed forbidden lines (predominantly the [O i] line at 6300 A) from a sample of 33 T-Tauri stars with disks spanning a range of evolutionary stages. After removing a high-velocity component (HVC) associated with microjets, we focused our efforts on studying the low-velocity component (LVC) to better elucidate its origin.

The LVC can be attributed to slow disk winds that are either thermally or magnetically driven. We found that the LVC itself can be resolved into two distinct components: a broad component (FWHM > 40 km/s) and a narrow component (FWHM < 40 km/s). Additionally, we found that the FWHM 15 of both components correlates with the disk inclination, consistent with Keplerian broadening from radii of 0.05 to 0.5 AU for the BC and 0.5 to 5 AU for the NC. Since the BC emission arises inward of 0.5 AU where the gravity of the star/disk system is strong, we eliminated the possibility that the BC traces a thermally-driven wind, and instead suggested that it traces the base of a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) wind. For the NC, half of the features we observed had centroid velocities consistent with the stellar velocity, and the other half had blueshifts between -2 and -5 km/s. For this component of the LVC, the origin remains more elusive, and we could not exclude the possibility that the NC arises in a photoevaporative wind.