Congratulations Catalina!

Catalina Zamora, my third UMass graduate student and lab co-mentee with Kim Ward-Duong, presented her PhD candidacy IRP back in September, and yesterday she got the official word from the committee that she has passed! Cat's project, STARSPOP (Simulation Tool for Accretion Rates and (Sub)stellar POpulation Properties), is a Monte Carlo simulation that propagates uncertainties in mass accretion rate calculations all the way from observable to inferred properties to help disentangle the sources - physical and observational - of variations in mass accretion rate as a function of mass.

Cat's results are already pointing toward something interesting: her tool is able to reproduce observed accretion rates in the stellar regime quite well, but not in the substellar regime — a discrepancy that may hint at genuinely different underlying physics for how the lowest-mass objects accrete. There is a lot of follow-up work to do here, and a paper in preparation that I am very excited about (STARSPOP I, coming soon to an arXiv near you).

It feels appropriate to be writing this post almost exactly a year after Jada's. Both of my graduate students are now PhD candidates working on closely related but distinct corners of the substellar accretion puzzle — exciting times! Congratulations, Cat!