Congratulations Jada!

Big news from the lab. Jada Louison, my graduate student at UMass and lab co-mentee with Kim Ward-Duong, passed her PhD candidacy exam! Jada gave an excellent IRP (Initial Research Project) presentation on "Probing the Formation Mechanisms of Brown Dwarfs and Planetary-Mass Objects using Keck/LRIS" last week, walking the audience through her work to build a sample of UV-optical spectra of accreting brown dwarfs and very low mass objects with the LRIS spectrograph (the Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrograph) on the Keck I telescope.

Jada's project sits right at one of the most interesting boundaries in our field - that separating planets and stars. The "substellar" regime contains both brown dwarfs and very massive planets, and it is where the formation pathways that produce stars and more "typical" (solar-system-like) planets blur together in ways we still don't really understand. By collecting Keck/LRIS spectra of accreting substellar objects that span this mass regime, she is building a clearer empirical picture of how (and whether) accretion signatures change as you move from the bottom of the stellar mass function down through brown dwarfs and into the planetary-mass regime. This kind of work is critical to almost all of the work that we're doing in the lab to understand star and planet formation processes.

Jada's presentation was followed by a "defense" of her research work with the IRP committee and a detailed review of her classwork and written qualifying exam results by the full faculty — an intense process! I am, as always, ridiculously proud. Congratulations, Jada — onward to the dissertation!