Team Members
Project Teams and Research Group Members
I have been fortunate to work with many extraordinary individuals on satellite missions, technology development projects, and science investigations. This is by no means an exhaustive list, as this webpage would be very long, but listed here are a few major project teams and recent postdoc, grad, and undergrad students.
The background is a video of a solar flare extreme ultraviolet emission from NASA SDO AIA highly processed by Prof. Miloslav Druckmüller (http://www.zam.fme.vutbr.cz/~druck/).
Team
MinXSS-1, MinXSS-2, and DAXSS Team has worked to create CubeSats to measure the Solar soft X-ray spectra.
Hinode X-ray Telescope
Team
Hinode XRT is a soft X-ray imaging telescope that is a consortium between SAO, JAXA, NASA MSFC, MSU, and more.
SSAXI-Rocket
Team
SSAXI-Rocket is a solar physics X-ray imager instrument on the Hi-C Flare NASA Sounding rocket payload, designed to measure the brightest solar flares.
SSAXI-SmallSat
Team
SSAXI-SmallSat is an astrophysics and solar physics mission under development to measure the quiescent soft X-ray flux and tiny transients.
High Resolution Coronal Imager
Team
Hi-C is an extreme ultraviolet imaging telescope on a NASA sounding rocket that is a consortium between the CfA,, NASA MSFC, MSU, and more.
ECCCO
Team
ECCCO is an EUV spectral imaging instrument suite that is a consortium between SAO, SWRI, and BAE.
SEEJ SmallSat
Team
SEEJ is an astrophysics mission concept to measure the atmosphereic properties of hot Jupiters and the variability of their host stars using soft X-ray spectral transits.
Research Interest: Solar flares, X-rays and discovering new phenomena
Research Project: Solar Flare Plasma Transport Inferred from Elemental Abundance Changes using soft X-ray Spectra
Current Institution: Vanderbilt University
Websites: LinkedIn
Raveena Khan
Graduate Student/Postdoc
2025 - Present
Research Interest: Solar spectropolarimetry, optical designing, instrumentation, atomic physics, coronal magnetism and its implications on the Sun's dynamics
Research Project: CfA project on the development of a high vacuum system for X-ray and EUV photon detection.
Current Institution: Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA)
Websites: Researchgate
Xiaoyan Xie
(谢小妍)
Postdoc
2025 - Present
Research Interest:Energy release and evolution of solar flares and CMEs, Fine structures during solar eruptions (e.g., turbulent flows,supra-arcade downflows, current sheets, plasmoids, EUV waves), Impact of turbulence on physical process flares andCMEs, calibration on astrophysical soft-X ray and EUV instruments
Research Project: Leading the project on revealing the role of energy transfer of supra-arcade downflows, collaborating on cross-calibration between Hinode/XRT soft X-ray imager and cubesats DAXSS and MinXSS , and participating on 3D flare MHDand particle simulations.
Current Institution: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)
Websites: CfA Page
Soumya Roy
Graduate Student
2022 - Present
Research Interest: Solar flares, their effect on the surrounding solar atmosphere, the energyrelease mechanism and their long term effect on Earth's atmosphere.
Research Project: CfA project on Solar Flare thermal and non-thermal energy partition (Co-Advised with Dr. Kathy Reeves) . Also a member of the Solar Ultraviolet ImagingTelescope (SUIT) team on Aditya-L1.
Current Institution: The Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA)
Websites: IUCAA
Robert Bush
Undergraduate Student
2025 - Present
Research Interest: Physics & Mathematics. Solar physics, coronal shocks, CMEs, solar flares.
Research Project: Data Characterizing X-ray detectors. Building radioactive source holders for lab experiments.
Current Institution: Tufts University
Websites: LinkedIn
Evan Perez
2024 - Present
Research Interest: Statistics, Mathematics, and Computer Science; Wanting to study/work in Data Science/Statistics.
Research Project: Data Exploration in Search of Small Pulsations in Solar X-Ray Flares with the Hinode X-ray Telescope (XRT)
Current Institution: CUNY - City College of New York
Websites: Github website
Joy Velasquez
2020 - Present
Research Interest: Open-source software, Python coding for testing/debugging, instrument operations, high-energy solar events such as solar flares.
Research Project: Hinode-X-Ray Telescope (XRT) instrument operations, data analysis, and leads the development of XRTpy, a Python package for XRT data analysis. Additionally, supports the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) Solar Wind Electrons Alphas & Protons (SWEAP) team, focusing on creating code for data validation, testing methods, and spacecraft-instrument activities.
Current Institution: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)
Websites: LinkedIn
Jorge Padial Doble
Graduate Student
2023 - Present
Research Interest: Passionate about data integrity given to statistical inference models. Concentrates on using scaled High-Performance Computing and Machine Learning techniques to curate data products that increase the validity and veracity of science applied to solar flares, atmospheric Heliophysics, and the Earth-Sun system.
Research Project: Jorge developed the ALEXIS pipeline capable of ingesting 100’s of TB of EUV data to produce a novel data product for Solar Flare prediction.
Current Institution: Vanderbilt University
Websites: LinkedIn
Brendan D'Aquino
2022 - Present
Research Interest: Software engineering, solar physics, non-lineardynamics and numerical simulations.
Research Project: Development of automatic data processing software for X-ray spectrometers.
Current Institution: Northeastern University
Websites: LinkedIn
Juliana Xene Barstow
2022 - 2024
Research Interest: Instrumentation, robotics engineering, solar physics.
Research Project: Characterizing the noise of a CMOS soft x-ray detector from readout rates
Current Institution: New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Websites: LinkedIn
Sophia Araceli Sánchez-Maes
Graduate Student
2022 - 2024
Research Interest: Magnetic reconnection, plasma dynamics and energetics, patterns of magnetic activity, instabilities and state change, high energy astrophysics and heliophysics, scientific computing, x-ray detectors, and mission development.
Research Project: Swift Solar Activity X-ray Imager (SSAXI-Rocket) mission; Energetics and dynamics of large solar flares via observation, simulation (co-advised Kathy Reeves), and instrumentation.
Current Institution: Harvard Department of Astronomy
Websites: https://astronomy.fas.harvard.edu/people/sophia-sanchez-maes
Ritesh V. Pandohie
2022 - 2023
Research Interest: Currently participating in projects within the areas of nanophotonics, solar physics instrumentation, and experimental cosmology, but hopes to pursue applied physics or computational astrophysics for graduate studies.
Research Project: Characterizing the spectral resolution of silicon CMOS detectors for solar physics.
Current Institution: Cornell University
Websites: LinkedIn
Rachel Nere
Research Interest: Galaxy evolution, stellar evolution, instrumentation, dark matter, black holes, interdisciplinary studies.
Research Project: Aiding in the development of instrumentation through the process of launching the SSAXI-Rocket mission to observe large solar flares.
Current Institution:
Georgia Institute of Technology
Websites: LinkedIn
Carleano Libretto
Research Interest: Macroeconomic theory, data science, personality psychology
Research Project: Analysis of the Distribution of Flare Loop Emission using Multiple Channels of SDO/AIA Observation (Final Presentation Video)
Current Institution: University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Websites: LinkedIn
Rebecca FitzGerald
2020
Research Interest: My goal is to pursue a PhD in a field related to astronomical imaging (possibly optics).
Research Project: Calibrate CMOS detectors for scientific measurements.
Current Institution: Rochester Institute of Technology
Websites: LinkedIn
Carson Geottlicher
2019
Research Interest: Black Hole Theory and General Relativity
Research Project: Solar Flare Soft X-Ray Time Series Spectrum Reconstruction
synthesize missing soft X-ray data in order to better understand the
interaction of Earth's atmosphere with soft X-rays emitted from solar flares.
Current Institution: Towson University
Websites: LinkedIn
Sierra Garza
2018
Research Interest: solar physics, Stellar dynamics, Magnetohydrodynamics, High energy astrophysics and cosmology, Dark matter
Research Project: Analyze the relationship between photospheric magnetic field and soft x-ray flux in the corona.
Current Institution: University of California Santa Barbara
Websites:
Christian Carter
Research Interest: Material science and materials engineering.
Research Project: Enhance and upgrade test equipment that is designed to characterize the performance of space flight optics.
Current Institution: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP)
Websites: LinkedIn
Nicholas Renninger
Research Interest: Systems and software engineering for autonomous systems.
Research Project: Created software to control photodiode detectors for autonomous VUV mirror reflectance measurements in vacuum chambers.
Current Institution: University of Colorado Boulder Masters Student
Websites: https://github.com/nicholasRenninger
Liam O'Connor
Research Interest: Mechanical engineering
Research Project: Created mechanical support structures for vacuum systems to test UV mirrors.
Current Institution: Northwestern University, PhD in Engineering Sciences and Applied Math
Websites: LinkedIn
Eliot Kersgaard
Research Interest: Myra Makes
Research Project: Measurement of thin film UV optical constants.
Current Institution: Myra Makes
Websites: LinkedIn, https://eliotkersgaard.wordpress.com, MyraMakes
Caroline Leaman
2016
Research Interest:
Research Project: Understanding the energetics of solar flares in the soft X-rays
Current Institution: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP)
Websites: