# Thesis Topics
**Source**: https://astronomy.fas.harvard.edu/thesis-topics
**Parent**: https://astronomy.fas.harvard.edu/undergraduate-program
## **2024**
**James Cornelison**, “Constraints on Electromagnetic Parity Violation in the Cosmic Microwave Background using BICEP3” (October 25, 2023) Advisor: John Kovac\
**Michael Foley,** “Shock-Turbulence Interactions in Star Formation.” (April 23, 204) Advisor: Alysssa Goodman\
**Ana Maria Delgado,** “Analyzing cosmological-hydrodynamical simulations in light of future optical surveys.” (April 30, 2024) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**Zachary Murray,** “Small Bodies and Large Surveys: What Modern Dynamics can teach us about the Solar System.” (May 1, 2024) Advisor: Matt Holman\
**Magda Siwek,**“Signatures of Circumbinary Disk Dynamics in Massive Black Hole Binary Populations.” (May 1, 2024) Advisor: Doug Finkbeiner\
**Andrew Saydjari** (Physics), “Statistical Models of the Spatial, Kinematic, and Chemical Complexity of Dust.” Advisor: Doug Finkbeiner\
**Emily Pass,** “Terrestrial Planets in the Mid-to-Late M-Dwarf Context: Insights on the Spindown of Fully Convective Stars and the Rarity of Jupiter Analogs." Advisor: Dave Charbonneau\
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## **2023**
**Floor Broekgaarden**, “Gravitational-Wave Paleontology: A New Frontier to Probe Massive Binary Stars Across Cosmic History” (April 24, 2023) Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Daniel Palumbo**, “Interferometric Measurement of the Magnetization and Spin of Supermassive Black Holes (April 24, 2023) Advisor: Michael Johnson\
**Tanveer Karim**, “Precision Cosmology with Emission-Line Galaxies” (April 26, 2023) Advisor: Daniel Eisenstein\
**Lieke van Son**, “The First Pieces of the Gravitational-wave Pogenitor Population Puzzle” (April 28, 2023) Advisor: Selma de Mink\
**Charles Law**, “Zooming in on the Chemistry of Star and Planet Formation” (April 28, 2023) Advisor: Karin Öberg\
**Kristo Ment**, “Three Terrestrial Planets Transiting Mid-to-Late M Dwarfs and Constraints on the Occurrence of Such Worlds” (May 4, 2023) Advisor: David Charbonneau\
**Chima McGruder**, “Exploring Correlations of High Altitude Aerosol Formation in Planetary Systems with Similar Parameters” (May 5, 2023) Advisor: Mercedes Lopez-Morales\
**Juliana Garcia-Mejia**, “The Tierras Observatory: An Ultra-precise Time-series Photometer to Characterize Nearby Low-mass Stars and Their Terrestrial Exoplanets” (May 9, 2023) Advisor: David Charbonneau
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## **2022**
**Xiaohan Wu,** "Probing Reionization with Currently Available Observables of Reionization" (April 27, 2022) Advisor: Daniel Eisenstein\
**Maurice Wilson**,"Interdisciplinary Spectroscopy: The Detection and Characterization of Solar CMEs, Stellar CMEs, and Exoplanets" (April 28, 2022) Advisor:John Raymond, John Eastman\
**Ian Weaver,** "Atmospheric characterization of high-gravity hot Jupiters with ACCESS" (April 29, 2022) Advisor: Mercedes Lopez-Morales\
**Rohan Naidu,** "Probing Reionization with Currently Available Observables of Reionization" (April 27, 2022) Advisor: Charles Conroy\
**Nina Maksimova,** "AbacusSummit: Next Generation N-Body Cosmology" (May 9, 2022) Advisor: Daniel Eisenstein\
**Boryana Hadzhiyska,** "Forward Modeling in the Era of Cosmological Surveys" (May 11, 2022) Advisor:Daniel Eisenstein, Lars Hernquist\
**Brandon Curd,** "Numerical Simulations of Super-Eddington Accretion Disks and Their Application to Tidal Disruption Events" (June 28, 2022) Advisor: Ramesh Narayan\
**Chantanelle Nava**, "Tackling Stellar Active Regions in Radial Velocities: Strategies to Improve and Expand Small Exoplanet Mass Measurements" (June 29, 2022)Advisor: Mercedes Lopez-Morales\
**Daniel Violette**, "Optimizing CdZnTe Detectors to Discover High Energy Transient Phenomena" (September 7, 2022) Advisor: Jonathan Grindlay
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## 2021
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**Munazza Alam**, "Characterizing Distant Worlds: Atmospheric Reconnaissance of Giant Planets with Hubble" (April 6, 2021) Advisor:Mercedes Lopez-Morales\
**Sihan Yuan**, "Towards better interpretation of small-scale structure of the Universe" (April 20, 2021) Advisor: Daniel Eisenstein\
**Seth Gossage**, "Next Generation Stellar Models with Rotation" (April 23, 2021)Advisor: Charles Conroy\
**Amber Medina**, “The Magnetic Connection Between Flares, Rotation, and Age for the Volume-Complete Sample of Fully Convective M Dwarfs within 15 Parsecs" (April 29, 2021) Advisor: David Charbonneau\
**Jamila Pegues**, "Protoplanetary Disk Chemistry across the Stellar Spectrum" (April 30, 2021) Advisor: Karin Öberg\
**Ellen Price**, "Simulating Protoplanetary Disk Dynamics and Investigating their Exoplanet Outcomes" (May 3, 2021) Advisor: Karin Öberg\
**Sebastian Gomez,** "Exotic Transients and How to Find Them" **(**May 4, 2021) Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Tarraneh Eftekhari**, "Unveiling the Transient Radio and Millimeter Sky" (May 6, 2021)Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Ana-Roxana Pop**, "Computational Modeling of the Baryon Content of Galaxies and Clusters in Cosmological Simulations" (May 7, 2021) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**Theron Carmichael**, "Dwarfing expectations: The rapid expansion of the transiting brown dwarf population in the era of the TESS mission." (May 10, 2021) Advisor: David Latham\
**Ioana Zelko**, "Stardust and Cosmology" (June 23, 2021) Advisor: Doug Finkbeiner\
**John Lewis**, "Structurally Sound: The Effect of Cloud Structure on 3 Pillars of Star Formation" (August 24, 2021) Advisor: Charles Lada\
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## 2020
**Victoria Ashley Villlar,** "Time-Domain Studies in the New Eras of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics and Big Data" (April 14, 2020)Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Zoe Todd**, "From Astronomy to Chemistry: Origins of the Building Blocks of Life" (April 15, 2020) Advisor: Dimitar Sasselov\
**Catherine Zucker**, "Charting our Uncharted Milky Way" (April 2020) Advisor: Doug Finkbeiner, Alyssa Goodman\
**Joshua Speagle,** "Mapping the Milky Way in the Age of Gaia" (May 6, 2020) Advisor: Charlie Conroy, Daniel Eisenstein, & Doug Finkbeiner\
**Hannah Diamond-Lowe**, "A First Reconnaissance of the Atmospheres of Terrestrial Exoplanets Using Ground-Based Optical Transits and Space-Based UV Spectra" (2020) Advisor: David Charbonneau
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## 2019
**Meng Gu,** "Stellar Populations and Assembly Histories of Galaxies in Nearby Massive Clusters" (April 3, 2019) Advisor: Jennifer Yee\
**Xiawei Wang**, "Non-thermal emission from collisionless astrophysical shocks and their observational implications" (April 17, 2019) Advisor: Avi Loeb\
**Peter Blanchard**, "Exploring Exotic Transients: Stellar Explosions, Tidal Disruptions, and Compact Object Mergers in the Golden Age of Time-Domain Astronomy" (April 26, 2019) Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Lehman Garrison**, "Abacus: N-body Cosmology for the Next Generation of Dark Energy Science" (May 3, 2019) Advisor: Daniel Eisenstein\
**Benjamin Cook**, "Computational Approaches to Studying the Stellar Populations of Galaxies" (May 7, 2019) Advisor: Charles Conroy
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## 2018
**Kate Alexander**, "Cosmic Extremes: Probing Energetic Transients with Radio Observations" (April 10, 2018) Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Fernando Beccera**, "Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds in the First Galaxies" (May 1, 2018) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**How-Huan Chen,** "The Life and Death of Interstellar Turbulence: The Intriguing Case of Ophiuchus" (May 4, 2018) Advisor: Alyssa Goodman\
**Jieun Choi, "**From Stars to Galaxies: Unveiling Their Properties, Connection and Evolution with Next Generation Stellar Models" (April 10, 2018) Advisor: Charles Conroy\
**Pierre Christian**, "Novel Astrophysical Constraints on Black Holes" (May 2, 2018) Advisor: Avi Loeb\
**Kunting (Eddie) Chua**, "Structure of Dark Matter Halos in Illustris: Effect of Baryons (September 25, 2018) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**Philip Cowperthwaite**, "From Design to Detection: Joint Gravitational Wave and Electromagnetic Astronomy" (April 20, 2018) Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Marion****Dierickx**, "Simulations of Local Group Galactic Interactions" (July 10, 2017) Advisor: Avi Loeb\
**Christopher Faesi**, "The Physical Nature of the GMC Population in NGC 300" (December 11, 2017) Advisor: Charles Lada\
**Xinyi Guo**, "Particle Acceleration and Heating in Low Mach Number Collisionless Shocks" (December 13, 2017) Advisor: Ramesh Narayan\
**Luke Kelley**, "Massive Black-Hole Binary Mergers: Dynamics, Environments & Expected Detections" (April 13, 2018) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**Ryan Loomis**, "Millimeter/submillimeter Observations of Chemical and Physical Complexity in Protoplanetary Disks" (April 30, 2018) Advisor: Karin Öberg\
**Stephen Portillo**, "Counting Stars: Developing probabilistic cataloging for crowded fields" (April 17, 2018) Advisor: Doug Finkbeiner\
**Anjali Tripathi**, "The Resolved Spatial Distribution of Solids in Protoplanetary Disks" (April 2, 2018) Advisor: Sean Andrews
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## 2017
**Dawn Graninger**, "Organic Chemistry during Low-Mass Star-Formation: The Role of Reaction Barriers and Ice Desorption" (April 24, 2017) Advisor: Karin Öberg\
**Kirit Karkare**, "Multifrequency Beam Systematics and Measurements of B-Mode Polarization with the BICEP/Keck Array Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments" (April 20, 2017) Advisor: John Kovac\
**Meredith MacGregor**, "Millimeter Studies of Nearby Debris Disks" (March 31, 2017) Advisor: David Wilner\
**Philip Mocz**, "Moving mesh magnetohydrodynamics: magnetic processes in star formation and cosmology" (April 21, 2017) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**Sukrit Ranjan**, "The UV Environment for Prebiotic Chemistry: Connecting Origin-of-Life Scenarios to Planetary Environments" (April 7, 2017)Advisor: Dimitar Sasselov\
**Laura Schaefer**, "The Atmosphere-Interior Connection: Rocky Planets as Linked Chemical Systems" (October 18, 2016) Advisor: Dimitar Sasselov\
**Joshua Suresh**, "The Coevolution of Galaxies and their Environments" (March 17, 2017) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**Yuan-Sen Ting**, "Unraveling the History of the Milky Way through Chemical Tagging" (December 10, 2016) Advisor: Charles Conroy\
**Andrew Vanderburg**, "The Past, Present, and Future of Planetary Systems" (May 2, 2017) Advisor: David Latham\
**Sarah Wellons**, "Massive Compact Galaxies: A Case Study of the Diversity of Evolutionary Pathways in Cosmological Simulations" (April 7, 2017) Advisor: Lars Hernquist
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## 2016
**Aaron Bray,** "Galactic Conformity via Small-Scale Clustering in Simulations and Surveys" (April 25, 2016) Advisor: Daniel Eisenstein\
**Ian Czekala**, "The Fundamental Properties of Young Stars" (May 3, 2016) Advisor: Sean Andrews\
**Jason Dittman**, "Distances, Massess, Radii, and Metallicities of the Small Stars in the Solar Neighborhood" (April 15, 2016) Advisor: David Charbonneau\
**Maria Drout**, "Astronomical Transients as Probes of Stellar Evolution and Mass-Loss (a.k.a. What Peculiar Transients Can Teach Us About Stellar Evolution)" (April 26, 2016) Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Gregory Green**, "Mapping Milky Way Dust in 3D with Stellar Photometry" (May 10, 2016) Advisor: Doug Finkbeiner\
**Elisabeth Newton**, "The Evolution of Rotation and Magnetism in Small Stars Near the Sun" (April 29, 2016) Advisor: David Charbonneau\
**Ana-Maria Piso**, "Origins of Gas Giant Compositions: The Role of Disk Location and Dynamics" (April 27, 2016) Advisor: Karin Öberg\
**Vicente Rodriguez-Gomez**, "Galaxy mergers and some consequences: the cosmological context" (May 5, 2016) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**Katherine Rosenfield**, "Applications of High-Resolution Observations at Millimeter Wavelengths" (September 18, 2015) Advisor: Sean Andrews\
**Zachary Slepian**, "Revitalizing the 3-Point Correlation Function Of Galaxies to Sharpen the BAO Standard Ruler" (April 15, 2016) Advisor: Daniel Eisenstein\
**Lauren Woolsey**, "Magnetic Influences on the Solar Wind" (May 2, 2016) Advisor: Stephen Cranmer and Alyssa Goodman
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## 2015
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**Courtney Dressing**, "The Prevalence and Compositions of Small Planets" (April 1, 2015) Advisor: David Charbonneau\
**Tanmoy Laskar**, "The Diversity and Versatility of Gamma-ray Bursts" (April 29, 2015) Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Gongjie Li**, "Long-term Dynamics of High Mass Ratio Multiples" (April 1, 2015) Advisor: Avi Loeb\
**Maxwell Moe**, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eclipsing Binaries" (July 15, 2015) Advisor: Rosanne DiStefano\
**Ranghild Lunnan**, "The Properties and Environments of Superluminous Supernovae" (April 27, 2015) Advisor: Edo Berger\
**Dylan Nelson**, "How Galaxies Get Their Gas" (May 1, 2015) Advisor: Lars Hernquist\
**Sarah Rugheimer**, "Hues of Habitability: Characterizing Pale Blue Dots Around Other Stars" (January 26, 2015) Advisors: Dimitar Sasselov and Lisa Kaltenegger\
**Li Zeng**, "Uncovering the Interior Structure and Chemistry of Solid Exoplanets" (May 5, 2015) Advisor: Dimitar Sasselov\
**Yucong Zhu**, "The Bright Side of Black Holes" (May 11, 2015) Advisor: Ramesh Narayan
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