BDNYC Members Announce Grad School Decisions

The BDNYC team is delighted to share the graduate school decisions of three of our members: Elena Litvinova Mitra, Jose I. Adorno, and Austin Rothermich.

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Two BDNYC Alumni Awarded NSF GRFP Fellowships

The BDNYC group is excited to congratulate two alumni members on their National Science Fellowship (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards! Victoria DiTomasso and Allison (Allie) McCarthy have both won NSF GRFP fellowships for the 2021 award year.

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BDNYC at AAS 231

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Last January, the group BDNYC was at the meeting AAS 231 presenting amazing projects.
Some news: Eileen Gonzales (graduate student) won the Graduate Student Honorable Mentions in the AAS 231 Chambliss Astronomy Student Achievement Awards competition for her poster! Congratulations Eileen! Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi (Kalbfleisch Postdoctoral Fellow), Ellie Schwab (Helen Fellow, AMNH) and Jackie Faherty (AMNH) presented for the first time in AAS an iPoster. Emily Rice (CSI, AMNH) had a successful Startorialist BOOTHtique with awesome stellar goodies!

Click more to see the posters from the group.

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BDNYC at AAS 229

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It’s time for the 229th meeting of the American Astronomical Society! A number of BDNYC members are there to present talks and posters so be sure to check them out! In this post, we list the times and dates. We’ll be updating this with links to the posters as well once the conference is over.

In addition to presentations, our own Kelle Cruz is running for AAS Council. You can find her statement here.

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BDNYC Summer 2016

Summer is always a special time for BDNYC because it’s when we have the most time to dedicate to research and spending time with each other! This summer, the group has students from Hunter College, the College of Staten Island, the Graduate Center, Columbia, and Barnard. I’m also proud to say that the SDSS Faculty and Student Teams (FAST) initiative is now supporting our students in addition to AstroComNYC and our NASA and NSF grants. Things are busy, but we took a second at the end of group meeting yesterday to take a picture:

Group Photo Summer 2016

Stellar Kinematics Application

Determining ages for brown dwarfs is one of the trickiest aspects in our research, yet a very important one as they allow us to estimate masses. One way many researchers estimate ages is by attempting to match the motions of the object to that of stellar moving groups with known ages. A match in XYZ-UVW space can suggest membership which would imply the brown dwarf is coeval with that group. One can calculate XYZ positions and UVW velocities in Python or your favorite programming language. BDNYC is now hosting a stellar kinematics web application that can do this for you.

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AstrodbWeb

Followers of this blog and our team’s scientific endeavors may know we have a curated database of brown dwarfs we work with. An initial version of this database has been published in Filippazzo et al. 2015 and contains information for 198 objects. The database is also maintained on Github, where we welcome contributions from other researchers. We’ve developed a set of tools for astronomers to work with SQL databases, namely the Python package astrodbkit. This package can be applied to other SQL databases allowing astronomers from all fields of research to manage their data.
Here we introduce a new tool: AstrodbWeb, a web-based interface to explore the BDNYC database.
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