Research Group and Alumni

Amanda Moffett is a 4th year UNC PhD student analyzing stellar disk (re)growth in E/S0 galaxies, considering both the frequency of XUV disks in E/S0s and the environmental dependence of stellar-stellar counterrotation in E/S0s in the RESOLVE Survey. Working with Prof. Gerald Cecil, Amanda also helped to build the Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector for the Goodman Spectrograph.

Mark Norris is a UNC postdoc who did his PhD in Durham, England. We are working together on optimizing velocity metrics for S0 galaxies and other projects related to the RESOLVE Survey, as well as on the formation mechanisms of Ultra Compact Dwarfs, intriguing systems that may be either giant globular clusters or galaxy nuclei stripped during minor mergers. Mark and I co-advised undergraduate Xuan Liu in a project on modeling galaxy velocity fields.

David Stark is a 3rd year UNC PhD student working on constraining the multi-phase gas content of the RESOLVE Survey, in particular focusing on direct 21cm measurements in partnership with the ALFALFA Survey and on predicting molecular-to-atomic gas ratios based on a new "fueling cycle" approach. David is also leading a GALEX Space Telescope program to search for star formation in the Smith Cloud (a large high velocity cloud colliding with the Milky Way), a project he first dreamed up in response to an assignment for my class on the Structure & Evolution of Galaxies.

Kathleen Eckert is a 3rd year UNC PhD student working on the mass census of dwarf galaxies in the RESOLVE Survey, including recovering dwarf galaxies missed by the SDSS redshift survey, improving SDSS photometry and thus stellar mass estimation, optimizing photometric gas fraction estimators for dwarfs below the ALFALFA Survey detection threshold, and measuring dwarf galaxy kinematics with a new three-slit image slicer she helped to build under the guidance of Prof. Gerald Cecil.

UNC undergraduates often work with the group, including current member David Hendel (shown below in UNC's Remote Observing Center, explaining his work on galaxy gas content as a function of environment to a visiting high school student and me) and recent members Xuan Liu and Grace Crowson, who presented their work on Modeling Galaxy Velocity Fields and Inclination Angles and High-Redshift Analogues of Blue-Sequence E/S0 Galaxies, respectively, at the January 2010 American Astronomical Society Meeting.

Alumni

Lisa Wei is an SMA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian CfA. She completed her PhD on disk (re)growth in E/S0 galaxies in October 2010 at the University of Maryland, co-advised by Stuart Vogel (UMD), myself, and Andrew Baker (Rutgers). Our work together includes a short paper on the RESOLVE Survey, a study of HI content and star formation in E/S0s, and a Letter on the relationship between molecular gas and star formation in E/S0s, with special attention to blue E/S0s in the low-mass regime.