Focus on Graduate Students

PTYS Graduate Student Namya Baijal and researchers at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory use computer simulations to model the formation of giant impact basins, or craters, on 16 Psyche in preparation for the arrival of NASA's Psyche mission in 2029.

Anna Taylor, Ph.D. student in planetary sciences, received the 2025 Sharon Langenbeck Amelia Earhart Fellowship

Team led by LPL graduate student Naman Bajaj uses JWST observations to provide a detailed look at how planets form from a turbulent cloud of hydrogen gas.

Namya will attend the Europlanet Science Congress – Division of Planetary Sciences Joint Meeting 2025 to be held in Helsinki, Finland.

Led by PTYS graduate student Adam Battle, U of A researchers have created an astronomical equivalent of a fingerprint database for satellites, allowing for identification of human-made objects in geostationary orbit.

Fifth year PTYS Graduate Student Samantha Moruzzi selected as a 2024 Amelia Earhart Fellow.

LPL Graduate Student Sam Myers is part of a University of Arizona team of faculty and students working to establish a science and technology policy fellowship with the Arizona Legislature. The National Conference of State Legislatures has awarded the group $100,000 to work towards establishing the fellowship.

Sam’s contributions include networking with current and former Arizona Legislators as well as industry and academia. Sam has also worked on writing and preparing documents and materials to communicate the goals of the project. Sam has been working with this team for the duration of his graduate career and is looking forward to further work in science policy, with an eye to careers in science policy.

The new study lead by PTYS graduate student Kiana De’Marius McFadden used 13-year-old infrared data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to support the mission’s flyby.

Zarah Brown, a doctoral student at the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, led the installation of 11 plaques depicting various objects of the solar system across the UArizona campus.

Quakes could be the source of the mysteriously smooth terrain on the moons circling Jupiter and Saturn, according to a new study led by PTYS Graduate Student Mackenzie Mills.