Yesterday was the last day of Fall 2024 classes at Yale, and one of my students gifted me this custom-made lithophane of the HL Tau protoplanetary disk! Look how awesome it is?! 🤩

Happy holidays from the Rice research group! ♡ 🪐

It was an honor to speak as part of today’s Kavli Astrophysics Symposium, rounding out an incredible week in Oslo! Feeling so inspired from this remarkable week with remarkable people ♡

Delighted to see this new paper out, led by Ben Cassese, describing squishyplanet — a jax-based Python package to model the signals of oblate planets! arxiv.org/abs/2409.00167

Check out the readthedocs page for more, including some awesome visualizations: squishyplanet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

A wonderful Kavli Prize Laureate Banquet at the Oslo City Hall, with the King in attendance and some phenomenal entertainment!

The astrophysics laureates at this afternoon’s 2024 Kavli Prize Award Ceremony, together with King Harald V of Norway! 🇳🇴

Outstanding lectures this morning by the 2024 Kavli Astrophysics Laureates! ⭐️

Excited to be in Oslo, Norway for the 2024 Kavli Prize Week, as a speaker in the Astrophysics Symposium celebrating Dave Charbonneau’s and Sara Seager’s pioneering work in the field of exoplanets!

What an honor and a privilege to join in on this historical moment ☺️

Wonderful day at the Flatiron Institute for the inaugural New York Area Exoplanets Meeting! A truly excellent lineup of talks — such a joy to see this conference come to fruition (and so proud of these three group members for their outstanding talks!)

The eve of Christmas Eve at Palomar Observatory ♡

Closing out the last few days before the holidays with my first in-person observing run at Palomar Observatory! An utterly inspirational facility with the warmest community.

(featuring some cloudy night tea by the fireplace ☕️)

I was out of town for the Yale Astronomy department holiday party, so my research group took a photo together and sent me a holiday card 🥺❤️

Had a spectacular time at the #opaga gas giant astrophysics conference in Patagonia this week — some highlights from Torres del Paine national park a couple days ago :)

p.s. I brought home a new puppy 1.5 weeks ago and he is Extremely Good! Meet Kelvin! ♡

First Bluesky post on this momentous first day of school on the other side of the classroom! Looking forward to a wonderful semester ahead :)