Follette Lab at AAS 245: Plenary, Lab Reunion, Poster

I had the honor of giving an invited plenary lecture at the 245th AAS meeting in National Harbor, Maryland on Monday afternoon. The talk, "Direct Observational Constraints on Planet Formation and Accretion," was an attempt to summarize where we are as a field in directly observing planets while they are still forming — what we've learned, what remains stubbornly uncertain, and what I think is coming next. The Astrobites team also did a really lovely pre-talk profile that captures my "de-twinkling stars" elevator pitch, and they wrote up a summary of the talk itself on Day 1 of their conference coverage. The recording is available here.

It was a special pleasure to get to highlight and advertise the work of lab alumni, including some in the audience! From left to right that's: Bibi Hanselmann '27, Josie Carrillo '26, me, Cat Sarosi '22 (now a graduate student at Wesleyan), and Beck Dacus '22 (now a graduate student at UCSD).

Special shoutout to Bibi, who presented his first AAS poster on the lab's ongoing "Comparative Analysis Tool for Normalized Imagery and Profiles (CATNIP)" project — a tool for quantitatively and uniformly identifying disk substructures. The poster was excellent, and he did a wonderful job fielding questions from a steady stream of visitors. Especially impressive given that he'd just come straight from a week at the SMA Interferometry School in Hilo (see the previous post).