That’s a Wrap for Summer 2024!
Congratulations to all of the amazing undergraduate students who joined us for our 8 week summer program! The Follette Lab was really the Follette-Rosenthal-Hemmler lab this summer, with Isaac and Vonna running their own mini-groups.
Under Isaac Rosenthal’s mentorship, the education research “quant team” work included:
Marius Cotorobai and Henry LeCates further matured the new QuaRCS SQL database so that we are not almost fully ready to migrate to it fully.
Autri Basu and Nghi Nguyen developed a set of statistical metrics and reports that we will use to identify instructors/courses for our upcoming classroom study
Under Vonna Hemmler’s mentorship, the education research “qual team” work included:
Wasifa Orthy analyzed interviews and artifacts from lab alumni as part of our ongoing effort to develop and field test a “soft skills” curriculum for undergraduate research mentorships
Jackson Carter analyzed data from focus groups that we ran this spring in which we explored whether and why the QuaRCS assessment items are equally accessible to all students
On my (exoplanet) side of the lab:
Harold Campusano expanded the database and developed a new protocol for adding to the Comprehensive Archive of Substellar and Planetary Accretion Rates (CASPAR, Betti et al 2023), plus taught himself a ton of python.
Bibi Hanselmann merged a previous lab project - the Flexible Image Gallery Generator (Summer 2021, Alex Del Franco and Dane Mansfield) into our disk morphology analysis tool. In the process, Bibi improved and added a ton of functionality. We’re now closer than ever to being able to do some real science with the tool!
Graduate students Jada Louison and Cat Zamora continued to chug along on their Initial Research Projects (IRPs), both making excellent progress toward next milestones while simultaneously encouraging and helping their undergraduate labmates. They were also both able to present their work at the Cool Stars conference in San Diego in June.