Graduate Students: Knicole Colon

If you ask Knicole Colon she will say she is from New Jersey. Originally born in California, her dad was in the Air Force, so they had to travel a little bit when she was young. Her family background is from Puerto Rico and, although she is third generation born in US, she still can speak some Spanish.

Knicole is passionate about astronomy but admits that the way she got into it is pure cliché. When she was 8, her dad used to take her to see meteor showers, which she found to be magical and exciting. When the movie “Contact” came out some years later her fate was sealed: “That and my meteor shower experience was enough to make me see astronomy as something cool and exciting; so I decided to go and look for aliens!” She jokes.

While working on her undergraduate in physics at The College of New Jersey, she joined a summer research program on star formation at Arecibo itself. Already feeling like Jodie Foster she came to UF with the intention of working on star formation, “but it happens that the UF Astronomy department has great faculty working on a wide range of research, and I got to meet Prof. Eric Ford. After talking to him I found that he had some interesting projects going on, so I started to work in exoplanets” Knicole says.

Prof Ford was selected to join the Kepler Mission Science team, being the greatest NASA research project on exoplanets so far (Kepler mission). Working with him, Knicole started doing simulations of Kepler data, even before the mission was launched. “This work was great and I used it for my masters project, but I was working on simulations. I wanted to get my hands on some real data” She remembers.

Fulfilling her desires, the GTC, the world’s largest telescope, started operating. The University of Florida was a partner into the GTC’s construction, so it has guaranteed observing time on it. Knicole was involved with a new project at the very beginning of its operation, trying to see planet transits. “I evolved from simulating light curves to acquiring them from a really big telescope” she says chuckling. “I remember when I finally got my first light curve from the GTC, how nice it was. That was probably my best moment as an astronomer so far. Our technique worked and I wanted to use it for most of my thesis work; it’s a very unique tool to use.”

In between the masters and the GTC, she also helped with operating the Rosemary Hill Observatory, which belongs to UF. Prof Ford set it up to participate in a project observing a transiting planet with a very long transit duration. Twelve hours of observations were needed to see a full transit, so several telescopes had to be used because typically nowhere on Earth is dark for twelve hours at a time. “Prof Francisco Reyes helped us a lot, and there we were; the three of us at the telescope in the summer of 2009. We actually got some data and observed part of the transit. It was awesome.”

Learning with this basic telescope helped Knicole to get ready for her observations at the GTC. “They are totally different telescopes and systems, but you have to learn somewhere.” She explains. “Since then, people have continued to use the Rosemary Hill telescope and it’s available for all students to practice.”

Knicole continues to use the GTC to get data for her thesis and has travelled twice this year to its location in La Palma for observing runs. She aims to graduate in 2012. “It’s hard to keep up with research and apply for jobs at the same time, but I think I can do it. It is not in my nature to quit.” She says happily.

Graduate Students: Izaskun San Roman

Izaskun always had it very clear: she was going to be either a musician or an astrophysicist.

She liked astronomy, but wasn’t your typical amateur astronomer, who knows all the names of stars and constellations. What lured her in was the search for answers, to try to unveil the knowledge behind all those names. “And while you can always have a harp in your living room, a 10.4 meter telescope like the GTC is a bit harder to fit,” she explains.

Following this reasoning, she moved to the Canary Islands, home to one of the best Spanish schools for astrophysics; La Laguna University, a long way from her hometown in northern Spain.

After college, she got married and spent two years working as a high school teacher, while her husband finished his own studies. Then she resumed her studies and started to look for schools to get her PhD, and applied for a Spanish government grant to support science done with the new GTC, by forming new astronomers at the UF. She got accepted and both of them came to Florida.

During her first year here, she took a class with Professor Ata Sarajedini about stellar populations. “I loved this class. Also, an important thing about doing a PhD is getting along with your thesis director, and I found that Prof. Sarajedini had a very organized way to work and a lot of experience. I take my work very seriously, I almost get obsessed with it, it goes home with me and I never truly disconnect. So far, I think I made the right choice.” Izaskun recalls.

But what does it mean to study stellar populations? “What I do is try to understand how galaxies form. Galaxies usually have different morphologies; they may be elliptic, disc-shaped, spiral galaxies... We want to understand how the universe is capable of creating such different kinds of galaxies. This can be done from different angles, for example, studying the gas in the galaxy, or the stars in different parts of the galaxies, or some other factor in different parts of the galaxy. What I do is study stellar populations; that is, groups of stars. To study a single star is difficult, but when there is a group you find that they have some special characteristics, because they were born at the same time in similar conditions. For my thesis I use this kind of stellar populations, called “clusters,” in a nearby galaxy called M33. By studying these clusters, we can understand how the galaxy was formed. It is funny, because at the end of the day I can’t say that I am an expert in this galaxy; only in its clusters.” Izaskun explains.

Besides her thesis, she has also joined a group that works with the Hubble telescope. “It's paying work, but that also means working double.” According to Izaskun, there is a difference between how people get their PhD’s here and in her home country “I have the feeling that here the work done by students is considered more valuable. Being a student doesn’t mean that your work is worthless, just that you are learning.”

But hard work is not the only thing she does “I like the life in Gainesville. It’s a nice small city, with a good quality of life and a great University vibe. I do enjoy having a big American style house, pretty close to campus and downtown. If you want some more action, Orlando and Jacksonville are very close. The only thing I miss is walking everywhere, like in European cities.”

Now she is very close to graduation and can look at things in perspective. “My time here has been great. You might have some low times, but it will pay off, as it’s a very comforting and satisfactory work. Also, every day the department is getting more prestigious. We aspire to get into the top ten and a lot of effort is being made toward that goal, not only to give everyone an outstanding education, but also to make being an UF doctorate a guarantee of the high quality of your work.”

Happy Birthday UFAstro!!

Every year Prof. John Oliver tried to remind astronomy personnel when UF's astronomy department became its own entity at UF.  (Previously astronomy was associated with physics.)  He was proud of this fact.

John, as most of us know, unfortunately passed away this past February 10th.

John devoted forty years of his life to his department and was passionate about its mission.  Therefore, I think John would have liked us to continue this tradition.

So, as John would have written:

The Department of Astronomy was born on (approximately) this date in 1979.

Howard L. Cohen
Emeritus Assoc. Professor
Dept. of Astronomy

Graduate Students: Mark Keremedjiev

Like most children his age, when he was eight, Mark Keremedjiev (Born in Pennsylvania, 1984; moved to Montana 1988) wanted to be an astronaut. For him this dream evolved into a true goal so when he was in high school he had the space program in his mind. “It was either being a scientist or going to the navy and becoming a pilot. I liked astrophysics and finally got in astronomy following this path,” Mark says.

Mark graduated cum laude in astrophysics at Cornell University in 2006. He was interested in instrumentation building so his advisor told him about the work of Stephen Eikenberry, a former Cornell professor at that time already in UF.

“I remember when I first met Steve,” Mark recalls, “He was really excited because he just got an NSF grant he was competing for with Caltech. He was very happy, pounding the table in excitement. At that moment I thought that I would really like to work with him.”

Once here, he got involved in a project to build a new type of instrument aimed to reduce the negative effect that the atmospheric turbulence has in ground based telescopes.
As Mark explains, telescopes work like a photo lens: the bigger they are, the more magnification you get. But this is only true until you reach about 15 centimetre diameter telescopes. Further on, the constant movement of the atmosphere degrades the images.

The instrument he worked on takes hundreds of pictures every second to compensate for these effects in real-time. This technique is called Speckle Stabilization. “I hope it can be used on 10 meter class telescopes. I’ve built a version that actually works and tested it in the 4.2 meter William Hershel telescope in the Canary Islands. I was able to conclude that when the instrument was on we got higher resolution that when it was off. That was the whole point of my thesis, to show that this is possible.”

Mark remembers the moment he realized that the instrument actually worked: “My best moment as a scientist so far: a very happy eureka moment. I started to dance and run around the control room in excitement. Was really neat, to see working something that just three years before was only a sketch in a piece of paper!”

Mark is also a musician, an athlete and likes to get involved in campus life. He was president of the Graduate Astronomy Organization and student representative in the Graduate Curriculum Committee.

He also joined astronomy department’s outreach efforts. “Our department does great work in outreach. I’ve been giving talks in schools to about five hundred students a year. It’s a great thing for us to do because people have such a fascination with astronomy that whatever you tell them, they become transfixed. When I was a child, I enjoyed similar talks too; in fourth grade we had an astronaut come to talk to my class. This was one of the most memorable events in my young life.”

Mark now has his PhD in Astronomy, and keeps the honest goal of becoming an astronaut. He even trained for and ran an Ironman race, with the objective of getting the necessary physical strength. Unfortunately, recent changes in the US space policy altered his plans. He is moving to Washington D.C. to pick up a government research position for twelve months with a prize fellowship from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. When it finishes he has been awarded an NSF international research fellowship to go work at the University of Cambridge on lucky imaging.

“For those thinking about graduate school, I’d say that now is a great time to come to Florida. There is an excellent faculty that covers a lot of research areas. Some of the graduate students starting right now will be using the 10 meter GTC telescope for their data and that is a very appealing thing. I’m really glad I came here. I had the opportunity to work with a great instrumentation person like Steve Eikenberry on a project in which I wasn’t just a cog in a wheel. If you go to other schools sometimes you’ll just be working on a subsystem of a piece of a part of a big instrument. Here, I did the simulations, the design work, the integration, the testing, the data analysis… I really got to do the whole thing and that is an experience you don’t get in many places.” says Dr. Keremedjiev.

Mark Keremedjiev graduated in May 2011.