Jan 28, 2021
Tonight we are very excited to welcome Dr. Ann Marie Cody from the SETI Institute to the WSH. In her own words, Ann Marie searches for "the weird." Young stars exhibit some pretty bizarre behaviors, all of which have astrophysical explanations. However, there may be even stranger things out there, ready to be discovered with space telescopes. Her upcoming project will be searching for "alien megastructures" using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
Ann Marie Cody is a Principal Investigator with the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center. She has also worked at NASA Ames since 2014, first as a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow and subsequently as a research support scientist for the Kepler and K2 Missions.
Dr. Cody uses ground-based telescopes and space observatories to explore the diversity of variability behavior in young stars. She uses this variability to learn about the dynamics of gas and dust associated with newborn stars and their planet-forming disks. Her time domain research involves high-precision optical and infrared photometry, as well as spectroscopy. In her spare time, Dr. Cody enjoys creating scientific cartoons to illustrate topics in astronomical research.
You can learn more about Ann Marie and her research by visiting her website, http://annmariecody.com/Home.html , and reading this NASA interview, In Conversation: Dr. Ann Marie Cody [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/in-conversation-dr-ann-marie-cody]
Be sure to follow Ann Marie on Twitter [https://twitter.com/astronomcody], and check out her artwork/cartoons on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/annmariecody_art/].