I did it. I wrote 4 proposals in 2 months, 6 this year. Will any get funded? Probably not. Do I still feel like a champion? Yes.

I can't wait to celebrate by watching paw patrol or umi zoomi with my toddler tonight 🎉

So excited to announce my other grad student Azeem Bari (not on bluesky yet) won a FINESST fellowship! I'm 2/2 for grad fellowships this year, great way to end my first year as a prof 😊 #astronomy

So proud of my student Brayan Hernandez for being awarded an NSF graduate research fellowship! ☺️

MUTUAL AID ALERT:
Stand with our community in Astro+ adjacent fields impacted by the attack on DEIA, support our community by giving aid through our GoFundMe. See links in thread!
- choir collab, @blackinastro.bsky.social, Astro Poverty Survey Team, MVMT Consulting @dranicole.bsky.social)

Everyone told me my first year as a faculty member would be hard. But I honestly feel like I've been thrown in the deep end without the ability to swim well and no life vest and everyone keeps throwing stuff at me and laughing.

youtu.be/1q82twrdr0U?...

So proud to show off my plaque from the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring in my office as new faculty at Vanderbilt. My experiences as a Sloan Minority PhD scholar had a tremendous impact on my career. I hope that in some small way I can pay it forward to future generations.

Quick update: there were some issues with the Swift data reduction for the SwiM VAC. We fixed these errors, detailed in this erratum: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Updated catalog (v4.2) is here: www.sdss4.org/dr17/data_ac...

Many thanks to Ruonan Guo and Cheng Li for finding these errors!

Is anyone else able to connect to heasarc? Was there a scheduled outage today?

I can't seem to access the website and therefore can't download data 😔

Astro grad students & postdocs can't afford children: My child went to daycare full time last year so I could work. We searched far from our apt/the university to find a daycare. We found *ONE* daycare 30min away from our apt (40min from Uni) that had an opening before fall 2023. 1/5

Thank goodness for Ms Rachel otherwise I don't think I could have handled watching my very fussy feverish toddler alone all day today on one hour of sleep.

On an extremely related note, she learned a new word today, "row" (from row row row your boat).

I'm excited to be featured in Science News Explores Magazine (online and print) 😊

Apparently having a toddler means that you recover from sickness just in time to get sick again. Meanwhile said toddle is jumping off the couch and trying to remove the outlet covers.

I'm excited to be a part of McGill U's Trans and Nonbinary in Academia panel this year! It is a free online panel and only open to trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, intersex, and questioning people.

More info/registration form here: www.mcgill.ca/equity/categ...

I am happy to present the New version of the Swift-MaNGA (SwiM) Value Added Catalog.
The data are here: sdss4.org/dr17/data_acce…
and the paper is on arxiv found here: arxiv.org/abs/2308.15551 (1/6)

The reveallagn first look paper led by Kameron Goold was featured in astrobites today! 😊 https://astrobites.org/2023/08/09/jwst-reveallagn/

I am excited to announce the first results from the Revealing Low-Luminosity AGN (ReveaLLAGN) collab led by Kameron Goold! We give a first look at the JWST MIRI spectra of our highest (NGC 1052) & lowest (Sombrero) accretion-rate AGNs.
arXiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2307.01252 (1/4)

Hello all, looks like I made it! For those who don't know me, I study black holes in dwarf galaxies and low-luminosity black holes in general.

I'm a postdoc at U of Utah right now, starting a TT job at Vanderbilt U fall 2024, and parent to two dogs and a very energetic 10mo old.