All are invited to come hear updates from Rob and others as we close out 2025-2026 the new academic year. The event will be held in person only . While we hope that you can attend on campus, we understand if it’s not possible.

Speaker 1: Katiya Fosdick (Advised by: Mike McDonald) Speaker 2: TBD

Speaker 1: Sydney Jenkins Speaker 2: Ore Gottlieb

Speaker 1: Ritika Sethi (Advised by: Sarah Millholland) Speaker 2: Xuejian Shen

Speaker 1: Amanda Peake (Advised by: Scott Hughes) Speaker 2: Christina Eilers

Speaker 1: Anders Lossius (Advised by: Nergis Mavalvala) Speaker 2: Daniel Yahalomi

Speaker 1: TBD Speaker 2: Gonzalo Herrera (Seeing the Invisible Universe with Neutrinos)

Speaker 1: Noah Wolfe & Sasha Lukina (Advised by: Salvo Vitale & Matt Evans- Geophysical Plasma Observation Expedition 2026) Speaker 2: John Weaver (Monsters in the Dark: Hunting for the first massive galaxies at cosmic dawn)

Speaker 1: Cian Roche (Advised by: Mike McDonald/Mark Vogelsberger) Speaker 2: Daniel Muthukrishna (Modeling TESS systematics with Generative AI)

Speaker 1: TBD Speaker 2: Tracy Slatyer

Speaker 1: Juliana DiVirgilio (Sharing Your Work With the World) Speaker 2: Avi Shporer (The discovery of a crumbling planet with TESS)

Talk 1: Teo Bulichi Talk 2: Kiyo Masui

Talk 1: Chris Layden Talk 2: Emily Pass

Talk 1: Pablo Mercader-Perez Talk 2: Juliana Garcia-Mejia  

Talk 1: Emma Chickles Talk 2: Rob Simcoe Lunch is a chili bar provided by Cafe Luna! Vegetarian, Vegan, DF and GF options will be available.

Talk 1: Cailin Plunkett Talk 2: Nikhil Mukund Lunch is provided from Sugar and Spice! Vegetarian, Vegan, DF and GF options will be available.

Talk 1: Vera Berger Talk 2: Tim Hallatt Lunch is provided! OTTO pizza! Vegetarian, Vegan, and GF options will be available. Email Juliana with any questions or concerns.

Talk 1: Jack Heinzel Talk 2: Jackie Hewitt Lunch is provided! The Greek Corner: Pitas, greek salad, rice pilaf, chicken and falafel. Vegetarian, Vegan, DF, and GF options will be available. Email Juliana with any questions or concerns.

All are invited to come hear updates from Rob and others as we begin the new academic year. The meeting and lunch will take place from 12-1pm in the Marlar Lounge. After that, MKI will (weather permitting) walk over to the dome for a group photo, ideally finishing by 1:30pm. The event will be held in person only .

Swati Ravi: What’s the Buzz About GX 13+1? Constraining Coronal Geometry with QUEEN-BEE: A Bayesian Nested Sampling Framework for X-ray Polarization Rotation Analysis https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07059 Saugata Barat: Exoplanets through time: First glimpse of the atmospheres of young transiting planets https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025AJ….170..165B/abstract Lunch is provided! Sandwiches and salads from Flour. Vegan and vegetarian sandwich options available along with GF

Zoë de Beurs: TBD Nathaniel Starkman: Tracing Dark Matter in External Galaxies with Stellar Streams from Euclid and Zooniverse   Lunch is provided! Bon Me rice & noodle bar- entirely gluten and dairy free with many vegan and vegetarian options.

Haochen Wang: Measurement of the Dispersion-Galaxy Cross-Power Spectrum with the Second CHIME/FRB Catalog: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08932 Rohan Naidu: The Beginnings of Today’s Supermassive Black Holes in JWST’s Little Red Dot “Black Hole Stars”: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250316596N/abstract   Lunch is provided! Anna’s Taqueria Taco Bar- entirely gluten free with vegan and vegetarian options.

Talk: Jonathan Chou A crisis in academia: Let’s talk about student mental health This talk shines a light on the “mental health crisis” in graduate programs, in academia, and in institutions of higher learning, in general. 41% of graduate students have moderate to severe anxiety, and 39% have moderate to severe depression. Students who belong

Talk 1: Malina Desai Advisor: Erik Katsavounidis Double trouble: Double-peaked Type II supernovae Talk 2: Jill Juneau COSMOS and beyond: Characterizing a new 8k × 8k CMOS astronomy camera and other imaging projects at MKI

Talk 1: Ritika Sethi Advisor: Sarah Millholland Signatures of atmospheric mass loss and planet migration in the time evolution of short-period transiting exoplanets                                                                 

Talk 1: Fatima Zaidouni Advisor: Erin Kara XRISM observations of AGN in the Performance Verification Phase Talk 2: Lina Necib Investigating the history of the Milky Way with Graph Neural Networks

Talk 1: Ryan Raikman Advisor: Kiyoshi Masui Dark Energy Survey: implications for cosmological expansion models from the final DES Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and Supernova data Talk 2: Misha Ivanov Galaxy clustering analysis with simulation based priors                                   Paper

Talk 1: Sasha Lukina Advisor: Matthew Evans The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: the first search for gravitational waves with the MeerKAT radio telescope                                                                 

Talk 1: Ethan Taylor The emergence of star clusters, dwarf galaxies, and something in-between within the EDGE Simulation Suite Talk 2: Hans Moritz Gunther Estimate of the carbon footprint of astronomical research infrastructures          Paper  

Talk 1: Meredith Neyer Advisor: Mark Vogelsberger Connecting ionized bubble sizes to their environments in THESAN             Paper Talk 2: Claude Canizares Hidden cooling flows in clusters of galaxies          Paper …a wider sample                           

Talk 1: Joheen Chakraborty Advisor: Erin Kara EMRI+TDE=QPE: Periodic x-ray flares from star-disk collisions in galatic nuclei               Paper Talk 2: Benjamin Schneider JWSTs first glimpses of gamma-ray burst progenitors    

Talk 1: Devin Becker Advisor: Scott Hughes Binary black holes on the brink of death: eccentric transition to plunge                Paper Talk 2: Salvatore Vitale The impact of selection biases on tests of general relativity with gravitational-wave inspirals       

Talk 1: Kaitlyn Shin Advisors: Kiyoshi Masui Updating the first CHIME/FRB catalog with voltage data Talk 2: Max Tegmark    

Talk 1: Emma Chickles Advisors: George Ricker, Kevin Burdge Searching for short-period white dwarf binaries using ATLAS and TESS Talk 2: Adam Lanman Overview and commissioning results of the CHIME/FRB Outrigger KKO         

Talk 1: Geoffrey Mo Advisors: Erik Katsavounidis Searching for gravitational-wave counterparts using TESS                      Paper Talk 2: Nuno Loureiro Reconnection-driven energy cascade in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence          Paper  

Talk 1: Wenxuan Jia Advisors: Matthew Evans Broadband quantum enhancement of the LIGO detectors with frequency-dependent squeezing                      Paper Talk 2: Deep Chatterjee Low-latency gravitational wave alert products and their performance in anticipation of the fourth LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA observing run           Paper  

Talk 1: Xiaowei Ou Advisors: Lina Necib, Anna Frebel Detection of the Keplerian decline in the Milky Way rotation curve                       Paper Talk 2: Vincent MacKay Low-cost, low-loss, ultra-wideband compact feed for interferometric radio telescopes            Paper  

Talk 1: Kai-feng Chen Advisor: Jacqueline Hewitt Cosmology with weak-lensing peaks in the Hyper Supreme-Cam Subaru Strategic Program Talk 2: 2021 census of interstellar, circumstellar, extragalactic, protoplanetary disk, and exoplanetary molecules          Paper  

Talk 1: Swati Ravi Advisor: Herman Marshall Dramatic drop in the x-ray polarization of Swift J1727.8-1613 in the Soft Spectral State                   Paper Talk 2: Kishalay De A star (black hole) is born  

Talk 1: Sofia Alvarez-Lopez Advisor: Salvatore Vitale Observation of gravitational waves from the coalescence of a 2.5 – 4.5 M compact object and a neutron star            Paper Talk 2: Edmund Bertschinger Critical analysis of a Physics Mentor Program  

Talk 1: Xiaowei Ou Advisors: Lina Necib, Anna Frebel Signatures of tidal disruption of the Hercules ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Talk 2: Avi Shporer GJ 238 b: A 0.57 Earth radios planet orbiting an M2.5 dwarf star at 15.2 pc