The Team

Core Science Team

Aaron Meisner (NOIRLab) is a staff astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona. He went to college at Stanford and earned a doctorate degree from Harvard in 2015. He specializes in processing large data sets of astronomical images, and previously co-founded the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project.

Siyi Xu (Gemini/NOIRLab) is an astronomer at Gemini Observatory in Hilo, Hawaii. She earned a doctorate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2014. She specializes in planetary systems and white dwarfs.

Sarah Casewell (Leicester) is currently an STFC Ernest Rutherford Research Fellow at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. She received her doctorate in 2007 from the University of Leicester where she researched both brown dwarfs and white dwarfs. Sarah is an observational astronomer working in the optical and infrared to study brown dwarfs in both wide and close binaries with white dwarfs. She is particularly interested in close systems where the brown dwarf has survived the death of the white dwarf and now is locked in an orbit of a few hours, subjecting the brown dwarf to high levels of irradiation.

Dan Caselden (American Museum of Natural History) is a security researcher and prolific discoverer of brown dwarfs. Dan invented the WiseView image blinking tool and has pioneered the application of machine learning in the realm of brown dwarf discovery.

Joan R. Najita (NOIRLab) is a staff astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona. She attended Harvard for her undergraduate and earned a doctorate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes circumstellar disks and star/planet formation.

Erik Dennihy (Rubin Observatory) is a Rubin Observatory staff member in Tucson, Arizona. He studies white dwarf variability and infrared properties.

Interns

Austin Humphreys is a Banneker/Key scholar and a recent graduate from the University of Maryland, College Park. Having earned a B.S. in Physics and a B.S. in Astronomy, he is continuing his work with NOIRLab by working remotely from Maryland with the Exoasteroids team. He is an experienced programmer, having worked on both physics-based and astronomy-based research projects as a part of his undergraduate education, ranging from plasma physics simulations, photometric analysis of planetary nebulae, and analyses of brown dwarf spectra. Prior to his college education, he had the opportunity to be an observational assistant at the Maryland Science Center's Crosby Ramsey Memorial Observatory for three years where he would operate and maintain an 8-inch refractor telescope for the public.

Hunter Brooks is a rising senior at Northern Arizona University working towards a merged degree in Astrophysics and Physics. Working remotely from Flagstaff, Arizona, he has previous experience with other citizen science projects such as Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors. Prior to his work on Exoasteroid, he worked as a NASA Grant recipient working under Jasmine Granani and Dr. Adam Burgasser on the study of brown subdwarfs.