Scholar Spotlight: Lina Florez

Our sixth TAURUS Scholar Spotlight is on Lina Florez, who comes to the TAURUS program from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she will soon be starting her final year. At UT Austin, Lina is working with Dr. David Wilson, using data from the Very Large Telescope to characterise a newly-discovered binary system.

Having grown up watching science documentaries, Lina first became interested in a career in science during high school due to really enjoying her physics classes. Her school encouraged her to seek out opportunities for links with universities, and Lina found her first summer research position at the University of Illinois while still in high school. With the help of the research advisor, Lina was able to secure sponsorship to attend that university as an undergraduate.

“In the beginning science was really intimidating to me,” she says, “but what I find interesting is there’s a lot that we don’t know, and I’d love to be a part of trying to understand that.” Lina has acted on that interest, undertaking multiple research projects at every stage of her education despite having to work three jobs to support herself through university. 

In addition to her work on a rare white dwarf-brown dwarf binary system at UT, Lina has developed instrumentation for the South Pole Telescope at the University of Illinois, worked on sky subtraction algorithms for the Subaru Telescope at Princeton and analyzed observations of quasars. Lina particularly enjoys the computational side of research: “I really like learning how to use my computer to analyze all of these huge sets of data and try to understand what’s going on.” These varied projects have given Lina an interest in, and understanding of, a broad range of areas within astronomy. She cites exoplanets and quasars as particular favourites. 

After her time at UT, Lina plans to apply for grad school to carry on working in astronomical research. Looking to the future, she sees programs like TAURUS helping to make the astronomical community more diverse. “When I started out I didn’t see anyone who looked like me who wanted to do what I wanted to do,” she notes, so the opportunity to work with a diverse group has been important. “I want to try and see more people like me in astronomy, so I go out of my way to tell people why I care about it so much.” 

Lina cites the advocates and mentors she has worked with as vital for helping her get to where she is now, and encourages students from similar backgrounds to do the same: “Try to reach out to people as soon as you can,” she says. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without their help. Also try to develop skill sets like coding, which are useful and will make you feel more comfortable when doing research. And try your best at school!”

Thus far Lina’s project at UT Austin is going very well, and she will be presenting her work at the AAS meeting in Hawaii next January. Come and see her there if you need a grad student!

Scholar Spotlight: Miguel Gutierrez

This is the fifth TAURUS Scholar Spotlight of the summer. Dr. Ben Tofflemire sat down with his mentee Miguel Gutierrez to learn more about his motivation for studying astronomy. At UT he is working on the evolution of very young stars.

Miguel Gutierrez joins the TAURUS program from the Florida Institute of Technology where he is a rising senior working towards a double degree in Astronomy/Astrophysics and Mathematical Sciences. Miguel has been active in particle and plasma physics research at his home institution but is excited for the opportunity to try on research as a full time job this summer. Miguel’s project focuses on determining how young stars interact with their protoplanetary by analyzing high-spectral-resolution, near-infrared spectra. 

BT: What led to chose your major and what do you like about it?

MG: One of the things that drew me to Florida Tech was that they offer a degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics, which is rare. I was always interested in studying space and stuff and knew that I wanted to pursue those interests in college, rather than getting a degree in Physics and waiting until graduate school to do real astronomy. Plus, the department is great and I’ve really enjoyed the Astronomy courses they offer. The Math double major has also been cool because I get a lot more of the background in statistics and math theory that has made my physics and astronomy courses a lot easier. 

BT: What led you to apply for the TAURUS program?

MG: I was interested in doing some kind of research internship to see how I liked doing full time research, mainly as a way to figure out what career path is best for me after I graduate. I searched for anything I could find that was astronomy and astrophysics related and came across TAURUS. It sounded fun and seemed really cool so I applied to it and got in, and I was really excited about it! 

BT: Who have been some inspiring mentors/role models in your life?

MG: Recently, two of my professors at Florida Tech, Dr. Perez (UT Alum) and Dr. Caballero, have both been really inspirational and incredibly helpful. It’s not all the time that you get to have role models that are minorities, especially in this field, so it’s been super great to see really successful people that I’ve been able to relate to on that level. Dr. Perez is my academic advisor and I’ve taken two of his classes, which have been two of my favorite classes. He’s a really good professor. It’s just really cool to have someone that cares about teaching and is super passionate about the subjects he teaches. It really makes a difference, since I walk out of every lecture excited a little bit more about science. 

BT: What advice would you give to high school or early undergraduate students who are interested in the science career path?

MG: Don’t be discouraged if it gets hard. I feel like a lot of people tend to cut themselves short and say, “oh I could never study that,” or “I could never do that,” because at some point they had a bad experience with a class or a person. But if you try hard enough at something, you can always do it. The way people get good at things is by doing them a lot. Math is a good example. I’m only good at math because I’ve taken so many classes. I’m not great at mental math, so if we were basing it purely on that, then I’m bad at math, right, so if it’s is something that you like, then go for it. Don’t let the difficulty of it scare you.

BT: What are some of your interests outside of school and astronomy?

MG: I definitely play a lot of video games, not as much as I would like to actually, which is a surprising thing to say, you don’t hear that a lot, but I really enjoy them. I like a lot of different types of games, but the ones that resonate the most with me are the ones that are really story intensive. I like watching movies too. I like pretty much everything, from Marvel movies to indie movies. I’m interested to see Midsommar, because it’s by the same director of Hereditary, which was one of my favorite movies of last year. I’ve also recently picked up the guitar. I really like music. I’ve been in band since 5th grade, and I really want to keep that going on the side to distract me from work in a way that feels more constructive than video games. 

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At the program’s halfway point, Miguel had made great progress and will produce some exciting results by the end of the Summer.

Research Pro-Tip #2: How to start writing a Scientific Article

This is the second research Pro-Tip of the summer, talking about how to approach the monumental task of writing your results up in a report.  Specifically, we're talking about publication of a Research Note of the American Astronomical Society, which is a little less monstrous than a refereed scientific paper, but a lot of the same concepts apply.

Not sure how to get started on that paper/article/research note? Have no fear!  Today I want to give you some tips on how to get started with writing.

Scientific writing tends to be a bit more dense than creative writing and a bit closer to journalism-type writing.  There’s no right way or wrong way to write scientifically, which can make starting quite difficult and nebulous.  The first tip I’ll give is to start by reading other papers similar to those you might anticipate writing.  If these were long-format journal articles, I’d point you to the papers you’ve been reading as references to understand paper structure, the types of calculations that are discussed, and what’s left out of the discussion.  In the case of research notes, it’s more useful to have example research notes than complete papers, so below is a list of some research notes published in the last year (**the first two were works published by Aimee Schechter and Laney Wicker, two recent UT undergraduates!).

Schechter & Casey (2018)**

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/aaf5cf

Wicker & Casey (2019)**

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ab298e

Abramson (2018)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/aada8b

Zink et al. (2019)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ab0a02

Pasham & Wevers (2019)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ab304a

Dingler & Cuntz (2019)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ab2c07

Konar & Chahal (2019)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ab2c06

Beichman et al. (2019)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ab2c9d

I encourage you to READ them.  This doesn’t mean you’ll understand every concept presented in each note because 1000 words isn’t a lot of room to explain your whole field.  Instead, as you read, try to diagram the similarities and differences between these articles.  Do they all start out in a similar way with a broad statement about their area of research?  What might that statement look like for the research you’ve been doing?  Take a stab at jotting down a few ideas even if you don’t know if you have it exactly right.  Try to go through the entire note while noticing the pattern of presenting data, describing a figure, and then drawing conclusions.  Are there key phrases that are used by many of the notes above? In what ways was the structure of these notes similar?  Did any of the differences surprise you?  The key to success with scientific writing is to emulate others until you get the hang of it yourself (often this takes years and years!).

Next, I’d encourage you to keep in mind: perfect is the enemy of good.  A lot of students struggle to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) for fear that what they write won’t be correct and will need to be re-written.  That is not only a super common feeling, but one that doesn’t really go away even after you’ve been doing this for years!  But sitting in that fear is not what will get the job done.  In order to practice writing, I encourage you to each take a period of the day (maybe 30 minutes this week, ramping up to 1 hour next week) to free-associate about your work.  This means keeping your fingers moving on the keyboard, writing out sentences, no matter what — even if what you have to say isn’t perfectly worded, grammatically correct, or eloquent.  You're just putting words on the page.  Revising a paper or research note with existing text is SO MUCH easier than working with a blank page.  Just. Keep. Writing.

Once you have words on a page — celebrate!!  And then send them to your advisor. Even if you’d feel embarrassed to do so! I promise they do not have to be perfect for them to read it over.  It’s not a book report where you’ll be graded on quality.  Your supervisor will just be thrilled that you wrote stuff down, and they will be extremely helpful in the revision process, helping you cite relevant papers, helping with the logical flow, etc.  Often they don’t know how to help you best until there’s a working draft in-hand, which can often lead to more fruitful discoveries in the revision process, but that crucial first step belongs to you!

Last thing I’ll mention today is the mechanics of writing a research note.  If you visit the submission info page here:

https://journals.aas.org/research-note-preparation-guidelines/

You’ll see that you can submit research notes either as Microsoft Word documents or in LaTeX (or Overleaf which is a form of LaTeX).  What’s LaTeX?!  It’s the word processor of choice for astronomers (and physicists), which is more like coding up a PDF document than designing it in a fancy graphical user interface.  Working in LaTeX can be intimidating, but if you’re eager to learn how it works I’d like to point you to some tutorials:

https://www.latex-tutorial.com/tutorials/

And here’s a link to overleaf, which is how lots of papers and notes are written these days, online, so you don’t have to bother with installing everything on your local machine:

https://www.overleaf.com

You can prepare your research note in Word, LaTeX or Overleaf, but I would encourage you to talk to your advisor first it before committing!  But in the meantime, don’t hesitate to get started in WHATEVER word processor you’re most comfortable using.  The important thing is to just keep writing!!

Scholar Spotlight: Oscar Chávez Ortiz

Our fourth TAURUS Scholar Spotlight of the summer is all about Oscar Chávez Ortiz, an astronomy and physics student at UC Berkeley. This summer he's working with Dr. Micaela Bagley on studying galaxies in the local Universe that might serve as good analogues to the first galaxies that formed 13 billion years ago. Dr. Bagley sat down with Oscar to learn more about his journey to UT.

Oscar A. Chávez Ortiz joins us from UC Berkeley, where he will be finishing his last semester this fall. Oscar remembers being interested in astronomy ever since elementary school, when he would go straight to the Space and Science section of his school book fairs and read everything he could find. At Berkeley, Oscar has worked on projects involving modeling Supernova 1987A and creating composite spectra of galaxies observed as part of the MOSDEF survey. He’s excited to spend the summer as a TAURUS scholar, discovering what it’s like to do research without having to simultaneously balance classes and other commitments. 

MB: What interests or excites you about science?

OCO: I like how science in general is about discovering how things work and how each piece connects to the bigger picture. With each topic, there’s always something to explore to a deeper level. It’s exciting to work with bits and pieces of information, like clues that you can tie back together. That was always me, when I see something happening I want to know what’s causing it and to understand the “why”.  This is one of the things that draws me to science in general and astronomy in particular, trying to tackle questions like “How did galaxies form?” all the way up to “How did the whole universe come to be?”

MB: What does it mean to you to be a scientist?

OCO: There are some big, well-known names in science: Bohr, Planck, Einstein, and many others. They’ve all done great work and made big contributions to their fields, but I don’t think science is a sole genius coming up with breakthroughs. I think science is more like the quote from Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” You start with a puzzle, you take it a little bit further, expanding on what previous people have done and gradually building up to the bigger picture. We’re always collaborating because we have to, space is so big! It’s mind boggling just how much is out there, how could any one person study it all by themselves? Collaboration is definitely key and is what it means to me in becoming a scientist. 

MB: Where would you like to take your passion for astronomy? Where would you like your career to go? 

OCO: I would like to work towards a teaching position at a university or community college. I often hear from friends outside of STEM fields that their math or science classes made them leave STEM fields. This kinda saddens me because I think that everyone has the ability to do what we’re doing. All it takes is having professors who can make the topics fun and accessible and the learning experience collaborative and inclusive for people to strive. When teaching isn’t the main focus, its natural that the teaching suffers and by consequence the students suffer. I really want to become a professor that supports my students and puts them in a good position regardless of the path they take; be it STEM or otherwise. And another reason I would like to become a professor is that there is not a lot of representation for Latinos in astronomy. There are very few people I feel I can look up to. I often have a hard time relating to the other students at Berkeley, and I don’t think they can relate to me, especially given my undocumented status. When we talk about our experiences, I think they can understand and empathize, but it’s completely different to actually feel what I feel, what I’ve felt essentially all my life. I’m missing a community, a network. I want to give a younger version of me a role model to look up to. I want to be able to show them that this is possible and that you are not alone. 

MB: What do you like to do when you’re not astronomying? 

OCO: I love soccer. I’m a huge soccer fan. I’ve played it ever since I was 7, and I used to train every second of every day. After high school I sort of stopped playing while I figured out what kind of commitment college would be. It was honestly a weird transition for me since soccer had been a big part of my life. But, while at Berkeley, I was able to get back to it. I’ve started my own teams to play in Berkeley’s intramural league multiple times. I also like watching movies, playing video games, and exploring new places and experiences. School and research are of course important, but they can’t be everything. We all need ways to let off steam and relax, and to find meaning and community outside of work.

Scholar Spotlight: Derek Zapata

This is the third of eight TAURUS Scholar Spotlights of 2019.  Derek Zapata is an undergraduate astrophysics major at Colby College and is working with Dr. Justin Spilker this summer studying galaxies transitioning to quiescence.

After growing up and going to school down the road in San Antonio, Derek Zapata has spent the last couple years all the way off in Maine, where he will be a junior physics major at Colby College starting in the fall. This summer we're lucky to have him back "deep in the heart" as a TAURUS scholar in Austin. Derek's research project this summer involves using ALMA to understand a type of faraway galaxy on the brink of shutting off star formation. Below Derek tells us a bit about how he got involved in astronomy and the TAURUS program.

JS: What inspired you to pursue a career in astronomy/science?

DZ: Since I was a child, I’ve always been attracted to sciences because of the allure of learning and exploration, and I went through many different scientific interests as I aged, uncovering my passion for astronomy as a preteen. Astronomy is alluring to me because of its mysteries and its potential for discovery. The idea of uncovering principles and finding things that humanity will never touch, yet are so important to daily life, leaves me with confidence that hard work and passion can not only answer the largest questions we will ever have, but will also contribute to the development of society and humanity.

JS: What are you most proud of?

DZ: I’m most proud of the educational opportunities that I’ve unlocked and participated in over the past few years. Going into my junior year of undergrad, I’m still thrilled that I have the opportunity to study my favorite subject at a prestigious institution. Though much of this is due to my hard work, having a close network of family, friends, and educators that support and encourage me has meant the world to me. I also am very proud to be a TAURUS scholar, and to contribute to real astronomical research so early in my academic career! Lastly, I’m very proud to be one of the few STEM scholars in my family, and one of the things that helps me most along the way is knowing that my effort will make my family proud.

JS: Do you have any advice for high school and undergraduate students of color interested in following your path?

DZ: There are two things that I’ve learned to do in undergrad that have greatly contributed to my success as a physics/astronomy student. The first is to ask questions. For some reason, our culture views asking questions and not knowing things as a sign of weakness, and this point of view can’t be further from the truth! Everybody has trouble with something, and there’s nothing wrong with asking for an explanation or for a bit of help if a concept didn’t make sense the first time. The second is to make friends and get to know the people around you, specifically to form a study group or network of peers with which you can exchange ideas. I’ve found that this not only makes homework and studying easier, but also helps to reinforce knowledge and opens up new ways of looking at ideas. Getting to know people is also a great way to find opportunities for things like internships and research positions.