Miller and Skinner receive prestigious NASA Future Investigator Fellowships

School of Physics and Astronomy graduate students John Miller Jr and Evan Skinner received highly competitive NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) Fellowships. Their research proposals were selected from almost 1500 in the field of Space Science and Technology with a selection rate <10%. The funding amount is $150,000 each for three years. 

Miller is a fifth year student in Professor Liliya Williams research group. He plans to study quadruply lensed quasars and supernovae in wide-field surveys such as NASA Roman Space Telescope and Euclid which will provide an unparalleled amounts of data. Miller’s proposal will go beyond the standard strong lensing paradigm, and proposes to use the influx of quadruply lensed quasars and supernovae, or quads, as a whole population to estimate the empirical distribution of population-level galaxy properties—without modeling individual lenses. This research will use the central regions of intermediate-redshift massive galaxies to answer various open astrophysical questions, like the slope of the stellar initial mass function and the nature of dark matter.

Evan Skinner is a third year student in Professor Ali Sulaiman’s research group. His proposed project involves investigating the driving mechanism behind ion escape from Jupiter's ionosphere, co-located with the planet's auroras. This work will use data collected by the Juno spacecraft and is focused on one plausible driving mechanism: the action of electromagnetic waves in energizing ions enabling them to exceed Jupiter’s enormous escape velocity.

Read more about the FINESST Fellowships on NASA's website

Read more about Williams’ research group.

Read more about Sulaiman’s research group.