2012 Undergraduates
Benoit Cyrenne is entering his fourth year as a physics student at Queen’s University.
He is interested in cosmology and high energy physics.
He is currently working with Prof. Dae-Sik Moon helping build the Wide Integral-Field Infrared Spectrograph, WIFIS.
Miranda Jarvis is looking forward to her third year at the University of Toronto in the specialist in Astronomy and Physics program.
The untold mysteries of the universe presented by astronomy fill her with wonder. She hopes to learn what we know and then expand upon that knowledge by exploring the unknown.
She is currently working with Shelley Wright, looking at the centres of elliptical galaxies for clues about the processes that feed their central black holes.
Alexandar Mechev has an undergraduate degree in physics with Astrophysics specialization from the University of Waterloo.
He is interested in exoplanet discovery, instrumentation and accelerator beam dynamics.
Alex has worked in physics labs around the world in areas ranging from detector testing at TRIUMF to spacecraft-shielding simulations at the Swedish Institute for Space Physics. He is currently working on the data pipeline for the Gemini Planet Imager with Dr. Jérome Maire.
Bryn Orth-Lashley is entering his fourth year as an astronomy and physics specialist.
He is interested in many areas of research in astrophysics; in particular, exoplanet formation and discovery, and observational cosmology.
Currently, he is working with Dunlap post-doctoral fellow Quinn Konopacky on a survey of brown-dwarf binary systems from data collected using the W.M. Keck Observatory LGS adaptive optics system. The goal of the project is to model the orbits of the system and obtain extremely accurate values for the masses of the brown dwarfs.
Steven Li is a fourth-year undergraduate Engineering Science (Aerospace) student at the University of Toronto. He is interested in air/spacecraft structural- and control-systems design and integration.
Steven was responsible for the design and construction of the SPIDER balloon-borne telescope SunSield. He is currently working on the structural design of the new Balloon Imaging Test-bed (BIT) telescope under Prof. Barth Netterfield et al..
Pegah Salbi finished her undergraduate degree at U of T with a degree in Astronomy and Physics.
For her undergraduate thesis, Pegah helped Dunlap post-doctoral fellow Nicholas Law build two camera systems that were sent to the Arctic. For her summer project, she is working under the supervision of Wolfgang Kerzendorf, Nicholas Law, Prof. Marten van Kerkwijk and Prof. Ray Carlberg to analyze the data from those arctic cameras. She will be looking for variability in the brightness of the different sources in the images. She will use lightcurves for known variable stars in the field to test the stability of the instrument. Then she will look for previously unknown variable stars, as well as new “stars” such as supernovae.
If time allows, she will help in developing a pipeline to be used on future larger telescopes planned for the Arctic, so that they can detect transient objects automatically and send alerts back to Toronto.
Sophie Shan is heading into the 4th year of her undergraduate astrophysics specialist program at Queen’s University.
A variety of astronomical topics pique her interest, especially those of stellar and galactic formation and evolution. She is also enticed by the notion of unraveling extrasolar worlds.
With Prof. Ray Jayawardhana and Ernst de Mooij, Yutong will characterize exoplanetary atmospheres through analyzing near infrared observations of secondary eclipses. This will further our understanding of relationships between atmospheric structures of hot Jupiters and properties of their parent stars.
Paul Tan is in his third year in Astronomy and Physics at the University of Toronto.
He is interested in stellar dynamics, exoplanets and computational astrophysics.
Paul is working on a summer research project with Nicholas Law, analyzing data from the PTF/M-dwarfs survey in search of planets orbiting cool stars.
Emil Terziev just graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Physics and Astronomy. He is interested in planetary formation, exoplanet detection and dark-matter structure formation.
Emil is currently doing a research project with Nicholas Law on measuring the fraction of stars of different stellar types that are part of multiple star systems.
Maryna Tsybulska is an undergraduate student in joint Computer Science/Physics Honours program at University of Manitoba. Prior to that she had studied Computer Science at Kyiv Polytechnic University in Ukraine.
Her interests include cosmology, search for extraterrestrial life, astrophysical simulations, complex systems and nature-inspired algorithms for data processing.
For her summer research project she worked with Dunlap post-doctoral fellows David Law and Anne-Marie Weijmans on MaNGA, a next generation integral-field spectrograph. In practice, she developed software both for simulating data from integral field units and for data reduction.
Andrey Vayner
Andrey Vayner is a third-year undergraduate student at University of Toronto, studying Physics and Astronomy as his specialist program. He is interested in detecting exosolar planets using both direct and indirect methods, as well as studying galaxy structure, evolution and cosmology.
He is currently doing a research project with Prof. Shelley Wright, working on studying the properties of host galaxies surrounding quasars by analyzing data from OSIRIS, a sophisticated integral-field spectrograph operating with the adaptive-optics system on the Keck II telescope located on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The main goal of this project is to subtract from the image the bright light emitted by the quasar through point spread function fitting, then search for narrow band line emissions from the host galaxy.