Leadership

Officers:

Chair: Murthy Gudipati (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) [2021 - 2023]

Dr. Murthy Gudipati was born and raised in southern India. He received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1987. After a 3 year post-doctoral collaboration with Prof. Josef Michl (at the University of Texas at Austin), he joined University of Cologne, Germany in 1990, where he was awarded Habilitation in Physical Chemistry (tenure) in late 1998. In 2007, Dr. Gudipati joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he studies the evolution of ices in the universe.

Dr. Gudipati's research interests can be broadly defined as understanding the physics and chemistry of interstellar and Solar System ices through laboratory simulations, observations and instrumentation. His research in recent years has focused on physics and chemistry of cryogenic ices. Knowledge acquired through laboratory experiments on ices is crucial in order to develop next generation instrumentation concepts for orbiter remote sensing, in-situ lander, rover, or manned missions.

Affiliation: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Contact: lad.chair@aas.org
Linkedin: https://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Gudipati/

Vice Chair: Stefanie Milam (NASA/GSFC) [2021 - 2023]

Dr. Stefanie Milam works in the Astrochemistry Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, Maryland USA). She is an expert in rotational spectroscopy, observations, and laboratory modeling of astrochemistry and molecular astrophysics of the interstellar medium, evolved stars, star formation regions, and comets with an emphasis on isotopic fractionation and astrobiology of primitive materials.

Dr. Milam maintains a renowned observational program with radio telescopes around the world, and with space-based observatories, to routinely observe comets as part of an international collaboration. She leads the SubLIME laboratory at GSFC that is dedicated to simulate interstellar/cometary/planetary ices and detect trace species employing the same techniques used for remote observations to help constrain the chemical complexity of the ices, the amount of processing that occurs, and interpret past and present data from missions that observe ice features. Dr. Milam has been working on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as Deputy Project Scientist for Planetary Science since 2014. Under this role she helped establish the next generation space telescope as a planetary science resource as well as helped implement laboratory support in general observing proposals. She is involved in a number of future missions and concepts that range from small bodies in the solar system to next generation space telescopes.

Affiliation: NASA SubLIME Collaboration
Contact: LAD.vchair @ aas.org
Webpage: https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/stefanie.n.milam

Past Chair: Phillip Stancil (University of Georgia) [2021 - 2023]

Dr. Phillip Stancil is Professor and Head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Georgia (UGA). His work focuses on computational atomic and molecular astrophysics including charge transfer, molecular excitation, photodissociation, radiative association, atom interactions on surfaces, and electronic structure of heavy atoms. He is particularly interested in applications to charge-exchange X-ray emission in astronomical sources, chemistry in the early universe, molecular emission from photodissociation regions, AGB outflows, and protoplanetary disks, and heavy-element opacities in kilonova outflows. He received his PhD in Physics from Old Dominion University while a Predoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Before arriving at UGA, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UNLV and then a Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Georgia
Contact: lad.pastchair @ aas.org
Webpage: https://www.physast.uga.edu/people/phillip_stancil

Treasurer: Christiaan Boersma (NASA Ames Research Center) [2022 - 2025]

Dr. Christiaan Boersma received his PhD in Astronomy (thesis) in 2009 and was then awarded a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellowship with the Astrophysics & Astrochemistry Laboratory Group at NASA Ames Research Center. After concluding this fellowship in 2012, he moved to the San José State University Research Foundation position he currently holds in support of a collaboration with the NASA Ames Astrophysics and Astrochemistry Laboratory Group. Dr. Boersma's research focuses on the role of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in a multitude of astronomical environments, with special interest for intermediate-mass star-forming regions. He conducts his research through analyzing and interpreting astronomical data obtained by today's state-of-the-art ground-, air- and space-based observatories, e.g., VISIR, SOFIA and Herschel, using a combination of laboratory and synthesized spectroscopic data. The NASA Ames PAH IR Spectroscopic Database (PAHdb) plays an important part in his research. Dr. Boersma had a leading role in the assembly and construction of PAHdb and its associated tools. PAHdb now guides the development of new methodologies in analyzing astronomical data, which are particularly relevant to data returned by future astronomical observatories, like the JWST.

Affiliation: NASA Ames Research Center / San Jose State University
Contact: LAD.Treasurer @ aas.org
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/christiaanboersma

Secretary: Rachel L. Smith (NC Museum of Natural Sciences/Appalachian State University) [2022 - 2025]

Dr. Rachel Smith is an observational astronomer and curator based at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Appalachian State University. She observes young stellar objects using ground-based telescopes such as Keck and the Infrared Telescope Facility, as well as the airborne observatory, SOFIA, to investigate prebiotic and protoplanetary molecules in disks and envelopes across the Galaxy. She is currently working with experimentalists and theorists to attain a more comprehensive understanding of the astronomical observations, and is very interested in interdisciplinary approaches toward answering big questions. Rachel also enjoys sharing the excitement of science with the public, and engaging her students in her research and outreach projects.

Affiliation: NC Museum of Natural Sciences/Appalachian State University
Contact: lad.secretary @ aas.org
Website: https://naturalsciences.org/staff/rachel-smith

Members-at-Large:

Carrie Anderson (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) [2022 - 2025, Planetary]

Dr. Carrie Anderson is a planetary astronomer in the Planetary Systems Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She has a B.S. in Physics from Arizona State University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Astronomy from New Mexico State University. She is an expert in remote sensing and radiative transfer retrievals of planetary atmospheres, primarily in the areas of thermal structure and composition, using space- and ground-based data in the visible, near-IR, mid-IR, far-IR, and submillimeter spectral regions. As a Cassini CIRS Co-Investigator, Dr. Anderson was heavily engaged in the Phase-E part of the Cassini/Huygens mission in the Saturn system through both data analyses and Cassini CIRS instrument operations. She also leads the Spectroscopy for Planetary ICes Environments (SPICE) laboratory, which is dedicated to simulating the effects of ices suspended within planetary atmospheres, necessary to interpret remote sensing observations.

Affiliation: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Contact: carrie.m.anderson@nasa.gov
Website: https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/carrie.m.anderson/

Ami DuBois (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory) [2022 - 2025, Plasmas]

Dr. Ami DuBois is a research physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., where her research focuses on connecting laboratory studies of plasma compression and velocity shear-driven waves to the dynamics occurring in thin current sheets that contribute to magnetic reconnection in space plasmas. She is also interested in nonlinear wave-particle interactions in the radiation belts and the development of novel diagnostics for use in the laboratory and space. Ami received her B.S. in physics in 2007 from the Florida Institute of Technology, her Ph.D. in physics from Auburn University in 2013, and spent 3 years as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Affiliation: US Naval Research Laboratory
Contact: ami.dubois@nrl.navy.mil
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amidubois/

Brett McGuire (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) [2021 - 2024, Molecules]

Dr. Brett McGuire received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2014. He was a National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Jansky Fellow and then a NASA Hubble Fellow from 2014-2020 at the NRAO and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. In 2020, he started as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research in the McGuire Group uses the tools of physical chemistry, molecular spectroscopy, and observational astrophysics to understand how the chemical ingredients for life evolve with and help shape the formation of stars and planets.

Affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Contact: brettmc@mit.edu
Website: https://chemistry.mit.edu/profile/brett-mcguire/

Dawn Williams (University of Alabama) [2021 - 2024, High Energy Particles]

Dr. Dawn Williams received her B.S. in Astronomy from the University of Southern California and her Ph. D. in Astronomy from UCLA. She did her postdoctoral work at Penn State University, where she joined the IceCube Neutrino Observatory Collaboration. She joined the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Alabama in 2008. Her research interests include detector calibration and the search for high energy tau neutrinos in IceCube. She served as the Analysis Coordinator for the IceCube collaboration from 2017 to 2019 and currently serves as the Level 2 Lead for Calibration and characterization for the IceCube Upgrade.

Affiliation: University of Alabama
Contact: drwilliams3@ua.edu
Website: https://physics.ua.edu/profiles/dawn-r-williams/

Edith Fayolle (NASA JPL) [2020 - 2023, Dust & Ices]

Dr. Edith Fayolle is a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her main research interests are the understanding of our Solar System chemical origins and the exploration of outer Solar System worlds. Her laboratory work focuses on ice spectroscopy, ice chemistry, and the study of gas-grain interactions using surface science techniques. She also has experience with molecular observations in protostellar environments and microorganism degradation under icy worlds conditions. Edith has a background in physical chemistry, earned her PhD at Leiden Observatory in 2013, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics until 2017.

Affiliation: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Contact: edith.c.fayolle@jpl.nasa.gov
Website: https://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Fayolle/

Carla Fröhlich (North Carolina State University) [2020 - 2023, Nuclear]

Dr. Carla Fröhlich received her PhD in Physics in 2007 from the University of Basel in Switzerland. She spent 3 years as Enrico Fermi Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at NC State University in 2010 as an assistant professor. She is a Cottrell Scholar and a Research Corporation Scialog Fellow in Time-Domain Astrophysics. She discovered a new nucleosynthesis process, the neutrino p-process, which for the first time allowed to explain some observed abundances in metal-poor stars. Her current research is centered around predicting multi-messenger signals from explosive events, such as core-collapse supernovae and pair-instability supernovae.

Affiliation: North Carolina State University
Contact: cfrohli @ ncsu.edu
Website: https://physics.sciences.ncsu.edu/people/cfrohli/

Joan Marler (Clemson University) [2020 - 2023, Atoms]

Dr. Joan Marler is an assistant professor at Clemson University. Her research focuses on atomic cross section measurements and spectroscopy with a focus on systems involving highly charged ions. Highly charged ions are ubiquitous in the universe and spectroscopic laboratory data contributes to the understanding of the physics of both high-energy astrophysical environments where they are produced as well as in low energy regions where they may interact with neutral atoms and molecules. Her current focus includes both visible spectroscopy of heavy multi-charged ions relevant to heavy-metal opacities in kilonova outflows, and x-ray spectroscopy coupled to momentum transfer measurements of light highly charged ions resulting from solar wind interactions with comets and atmospheres. She has a B.A. from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in physics from UC-San Diego.