Hi! My name is Ann and I’m a PhD student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science’s Climate Change Research Group (CCRG) at Northwestern University. I was born in New Jersey, but I spent most of my formative years living in Pennsylvania, about 30 miles north of Philadelphia. In addition to being a graduate student, I’m also an amateur (but enthusiastic!) baker, swimmer, and gardener.
In 2019, I began my undergraduate education at Swarthmore College with a plan to pursue a degree in Astronomy – a plan that came from a love of math, physics, and looking at stars. Along the way, I realized that I was also deeply passionate about understanding the relationships between people and the world we inhabit. So, in true liberal arts fashion, I graduated from Swarthmore with one degree in Astronomy and another in Environmental Studies with a focus in Environmental Philosophy.
Under the supervision of Dr. Deborah Schmidt, I spent my first summer of college analyzing radio telescope observations to determine abundances of HCN and HCO+ in planetary nebulae. The goal of the study was to better understand how these stellar remnants contribute to the molecules we observe in the interstellar medium. The following summer, I began working with Dr. Eric Jensen to identify young, low-mass eclipsing binary (EB) stars using archival satellite data. After examining observations of thousands of stars, my research partner and I had identified nine new EBs! Over the next two years, I used optical and spectral observations and numerical models to study these nine eclipsing stars. Well-characterized young stars, like the ones I researched, help us better understand how stars evolve at the start of their lives and subsequently provide insight into the processes of planetary formation.
As I begin my graduate studies, I am broadly interested in climate physics: in understanding the behavior of the physical world around us and how our interactions with that world affect our environment – and in turn, affect us. I plan to use methods that build on my previous research experiences (e.g. working with remotely-sensed data and running global climate models) in order to pose questions about the climate and seek answers that help us build more sustainable, just, and resilient communities.
