Current Members
Laura Venuti, research scientist
Laura is an expert in star formation and young stellar object variability. She obtained her PhD from the Université Grenoble Alpes, France, and is now leading our multi-wavelength program to investigate the physical properties of young stars and their disks.
Daniel Giles, postdoctoral associate
Daniel is an expert in machine learning for anomaly detection. He obtained his PhD from the Illinois Institute of Technology and is now spearheading our SETI program to search for the signatures of transiting artificial objects around nearby stars.
Dana Yaptangco, intern
Dana is a senior majoring in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Florida. She is an expert in light curve signal injection as a means to quantify the detectability of planets and other objects orbiting distant stars. As an REU intern, she simulated the effect of both simple and complex shapes transiting in front of their host stars.
Sabine Sulka, intern
Sabine graduated from the Jewish Community High School Of The Bay (San Francisco, CA) in 2022 and is now studying at Mount Holyoke College. She serves as the team’s light curve anomaly expert, having investigated and catalogued hundreds of oddly behaving stars in our TESS dataset.
Yifan Tong, intern
Yifan recently graduated from high school and is now an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley. He has developed machine learning software to mine TESS data for eclipsing binary systems and similar periodic fading events. He presented his work at the 2023 winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Shreya Chandragiri, intern
Shreya recently completed her high school studies and is now an undergraduate at Santa Clara University. Shreya has investigated the stellar parameters and variability properties of hundreds of young, intermediate-mass Herbig stars observed by NASA’s TESS mission.