Congrats, Mini!!

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy 2025!

I look forward to 2025 as AstroMusers is ramping up to publish new exciting papers. St. Louis will also host several major gatherings across physics, astronomy, and computer science: the AAPT Winter Meeting, AAS HEAD22, SC25, and MCSS 50th Anniversary Symposium at WashU.

AstroMusers started organizing the Astronomy on Tap St. Louis with the first two events on October 30 and December 11, gathering astronomy enthusiasts together from across the metro area.

In the Fall, I taught a new course, the Gateway Expeditions into Exoplanets, which was essentially a non-calculus version of Planets and Life in the Universe and served as the first semester of a new introductory astrophysics Ampersand Program for WashU first-year undergrads.

Here are some more 2024 reflections and news from AstroMusers: sites.wustl.edu/astromusers/...

In 2024, AstroMusers got new grants and published new papers. My grad student Bryce became a NASA FINESST Fellow. I received an RCSA Scialog Fellowship. AXIS was selected by NASA for phase A. Postdocs Chris (Jaynes Fellow) and Ekrem (MCSS Fellow) joined us.

On April 8, 2024, our host star and natural satellite aligned, leading to a path of totality passing just ~100 miles south of St. Louis. Before the eclipse, several faculty colleagues and I engaged with the public via our Saturday Science Lecture Series at WashU Physics.

Bendeki emeğin çok büyük sevgili anneanne. Çocukluk anımlarım senin özverin ve sevginle dolu. Şimdi ise elimden tek gelen seni minnetle anmak. Hayatıma kattığın her şey için teşekkür ederim. Huzur içinde uyu.

It’s challenging to label an entire year as good or bad. But 2024 surely had its bitter side. In March, I lost my dear grandma. My childhood memories are full of her love and compassion. Her loss was heavy and pushed me into a deep state of grief that continues to this day.

My faculty colleagues Rita Parai, Paul Byrne, Ryan Ogliore, and Mike Krawczynski and I will be participating in the eclipse viewing event at the Bollinger Mill organized by the Missouri State Parks. We’ll give short talks and offer demos.

The 2017 eclipse was an excellent excuse for me to travel from Boston to Idaho for the HEAD meeting. I am closer to totality this time as the St. Louis region is getting its second total eclipse in less than a decade. The forecast looks iffy, so fingers crossed for clear skies!

On the last day, we got to wander the visitor complex. What a rare occasion it was to receive exciting news from JWST Cycle 3 proposal selections *while* watching the launch of a batch of Starlink satellites from Banana Creek? It felt great!

I presented ExoCore, the open science curriculum my team AstroMusers, @astromusers.bsky.social, is developing for the exoplanet research community. ExoCore will encourage open-science practices, widen and democratize participation in exoplanet research, and facilitate discoveries in the field.