4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109Samson (he/him/his) I was born and raised in Montana, and made my way through my hometown college with scholarships and working off campus jobs. I began work on exoplanet detection there with the MINERVA Collaboration, an array of telescopes used to detect planets through the radial velocity method. I continued this work in a post-baccalaureate position at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where I worked for a year to help commission the robotic MINERVA observatory. I then went on to Ohio, where I began my graduate school career studying the variability of supernovae progenitors. I did this for two years before beginning work on making predictions for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman). My graduate work was focused on the anticipated yields and survey design of the Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey, which has a main goal of detecting a large number of exoplanets through gravitational microlensing events. At JPL, I plan to further the survey design and examine how the anticipated results from the Roman Galactic Bulge Survey will improve our understanding of exoplanet demographics
BA Physics, BA Mathematics, University of Montana, 2015. PhD Astronomy, The Ohio State University, 2022
Exoplanets, Gravitational Microlensing
I love to help organize and facilitate outreach events and to engage with the public, especially those who do not have easy access to the science community. I have mentored and advised several undergraduate students, some of which were through the Polaris program at Ohio State whose purpose is to increase the retention of underrepresented students in the physics and astronomy undergraduate programs
Exoplanet Demographics