It's a Ladies Extravaganza at Las Campanas

Sara Camnasio (left) , Haley Fica (center) , and Munazza Alam
(right) join me for a three night observing run at Las Campanas.

Tonight I report to you from a seriously female full control room at the DuPont Telescope.  I'm joined by three undergraduate students who work with my Brown Dwarf New York City (BDNYC) research group.  The fantastic trio includes Munazza Alam and Sara Camnasio, two City University of New York seniors, who have been members of my group for 3.5 years!  That's right, myself Kelle Cruz and Emily Rice have been training these excellent female researchers for most of their undergraduate careers.  And now they are ripe and ready for graduate school.  Both will be applying for programs or fellowship opportunities this fall.  Sara has an interest in the intersection of Science and Art and Munazza will do traditional Astronomy PhD programs.  They have both made their way here to Las Campanas with National Geographic Young Explorers grants.  Rounding out the fantastic three is Haley Fica who joined my team this past summer.  She is currently a junior at Barnard college and earned this trip because she spent two months reducing FIRE data for an upcoming exciting paper I have on the edge of submission.  On this run we are obtaining parallaxes for young brown dwarfs using CAPSCam on the DuPont and then parallaxes for cold brown dwarfs using FourStar on Baade and spectra for a potpourri of objects using FIRE.  Stay tuned for some posts from my female crew as we adventure through the land of (current) high humidity, high winds, and earthquakes.