Looking ahead to the spring 2012 semester
The fall semester has been excellent, and now that it’s winding down I’m looking forward to a busy spring!
First of all, my visit to Geneva Observatory in September was excellent – it was wonderful to work in person with my collaborators in the stellar evolution group (especially my host, Georges Meynet) and we’ve kicked off a brand-new project and series of papers looking at the effects of stellar rotation treatments on the stellar evolutionary models. I also finally broke my long-standing weather curse at Magellan, with two beautiful half-nights of MIKE observations looking at unusual red supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds. It was an extremely productive and interesting run (any time a spectrum gets an observer to say “Well, I don’t know what it is, but I like it!”, you know you’ve found something cool). These projects and others will definitely be keeping me busy during the spring semester!
I’ll also be doing some more traveling! I’ll be starting the year at the Austin AAS meeting (January 8-12), chairing and presenting in the Gamma-Ray Bursts oral session on Wednesday and volunteering as a judge for the Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards. I’ll also be an invited speaker at both the IAU 279: Death of Massive Stars: Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts symposium in Nikko, Japan (March 12-16) and the Fermi/Swift GRB Symposium 2012 in Munich (May 7-11).
Back home in Colorado I’ll continue working as coordinator of Beyond Boulder career mentorship program for Physics and APS undergraduates – check out the website for news about our Spring 2012 schedule! I’m also looking forward to another public presentation at Fiske Planetarium this February as part of their “Colorado Skies” series. Finally, I’ll also be working with the rest of the SOC on preparations for this summer’s Aspen workshop on The Evolution of Massive Stars and Gamma-Ray Bursts (June 17-July 1) – it’s shaping up to be an excellent workshop that has already generated a huge amount of interest. If you’re interested in attending, don’t forget to apply by the January 31st deadline!
