Congratulations to Molly Simon and Joshua Lothringer, LPL's newest alumni!

On May 7, Molly defended her dissertation, Part I: How Did We Get Here? College Students' Preinstructional Ideas on the Topic of Planet Formation, and the Development of the Planet Formation Concept Inventory; Part II: Evidence for Magnetically Driven Protoplanetary Disk Winds. Molly's advisor was Professor Chris Impey. She is set to begin a position as Education Postdoctoral Fellow with Zooniverse at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Joshua defended his dissertation, Characterizing the Atmospheres of Exoplanet Populations: From Sub-Jovian to Ultra-Hot Jupiter Exoplanets, on May 31. In August, Joshua will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Joshua was the recipient of the 2019 Theoretical Astrophysics Program (TAP) Graduate Student Research Prize. He presented his prize talk, Extremely Irradiated Hot Jupiters: Non-Oxide Inversions, H- Opacity, and Thermal Dissociation of Molecules, on April 1. Professor Travis Barman served as Joshua's advisor.