Congratulations to 2024 Follette Lab Seniors!
This year there were a record five (!!) Follette Lab undergraduate thesis writers. Help from me was pretty thin on the ground with so many students in the lab this year, so I’m extra proud of them for all that they accomplished. Combined, they wrote 586 pages of thesis text, gave 15 different thesis talks, and presented to one another at group meetings more than 20 times each. It was such a pleasure working with all of you, and you’ll be missed around the lab!
Bethany Martin ‘24
Bethany definitely gets the “best sport” of the thesis cohort award. She was originally supposed to be able to work on hot-off-the-presses Hubble Space Telescope observations of the planetary mass companion Delorme 1 (AB)b, but in a run of crazy bad luck, Hubble went briefly into safe mode right as our observations were scheduled to be taken last summer and they got bumped from July to August to October to January to June. Poor Bethany was strung along for the ride, but she rose to the occasion and did excellent preparatory work for that golden day when we eventually get those mythical data.
Courtney Reed ‘24
In her thesis, Courtney built upon the work of AY22-23 postbac Catherine Sarosi and made major improvements and advancements in one of our long-term lab projects - to construct a tool that will systematically analyze and compare the structures and morphologies of planet-forming disks across wavelengths. Courtney taught herself to work with a particularly tricky subset of radio interferometry data of these disks.
Giselle Hoermann ‘24 (UMass)
Giselle’s thesis was all about high-contrast imaging. Building off of the work of lab alumni Alex Watson ‘18, Clare Leonard ‘19 and Jéa Adams Redai ‘21, Giselle extended our PyKLIP Parameter Explorer (PyKLIP-PE) algorithm to work with multiwavelength spectral differential imaging data and applied it to a subset of the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) dataset. It’s early days for this project, but Giselle’s initial results are super promising, and we now have the foundation that we need to apply the optimization methods that we developed for protoplanet detection with Magellan to the adolescent planets that GPIES sought.
Adrian Friedman ‘24
In work that he began initially as a summer intern with lab postdoctoral alum Connor Robinson (now at Alfred University), Adrian built, installed, and commissioned a fiber-fed spectrometer for our campus observatory. Through many coooooold trials and tribulations on the roof of the science center, Adrian honed his instrumentation, engineering, and software skills (and patience). In the end, he was able to create a functioning prototype that we will be able to integrate into our stellar astrophysics and upper level observational astronomy courses.
Alex Del Franco ‘24
Alex’s innovative and ambitious thesis set out to develop and test a framework for interactive explanatory text and lab exercises to accompany an introductory astrophysics course. Alex spent a whole semester developing, adapting, and piloting various modalities, topics, and degrees of interactivity with real students in the classroom. He then developed a hypothesis around the role of scaffolding and interactivity in improving student learning and tested it with a series of focus groups. He taught himself to code and analyze qualitative transcript data, which suggested a nuanced interplay between scaffolding and interactivity. In other words, there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to each modality. Alex and I hope to continue to develop these activities and deliver them as a packaged curriculum someday.
Congratulations Bethany, Courney, Giselle, Alex, and Adrian!!