Research Opportunities with UT Faculty and Staff
The following faculty and staff members in the UT Astronomy Department have openings for undergraduates to work with them on research. Contact them individually to find out more about a specific research project and ask about working with them. For an overview of research going on in the department, check out the department's Research Groups.
Click on the staff/faculty name to access their contact info and homepage.
The "Skills" entry describes the pre-requisite skills that the undergraduate would ideally need to have for the project. If you do not have all the skills, but are very motivated for a project and are willing to work hard to develop the relevant expertise, then do not be shy. Contact the faculty member to discuss a waiver of the pre-requisite skills or the possibility of taking the project after you take extra courses.
Once you start to work on a research project, please make sure to email the name of your research supervisor and the project topic to the Undergraduate Astronomy Advisor (Prof. Milos Milosavljevic; milos@astro.as.utexas.edu). We need this information in order to nominate you for research awards and prizes.
Overview of the Undergraduate Astronomy Program at UT (pdf)
Current Undergraduate Research Projects
Advisor: Michel Breger
Research Project: Investigating the seismology of stars using spacecraft data
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: None
Advisor: Volker Bromm
Research Project: The James Webb Space Telescope and the first supernovae
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Any
Advisor: Eugene Chen
Research Project: Investigating the effects of residue nuclear burning on white dwarf luminosity function
Nuclear burning (NB) has often been overlooked in the evolution of white dwarf stars (WDs). However, it can be shown that NB is responsible to ~50% of the WD luminosity when the effective temperature is above 20000K. Therefore, it will make a non-negligible feature at the bright end of white dwarf luminosity function (WDLF). This effect has not been investigated before and could modify our understanding to the star formation history of our galaxy. We invite a student interested in theoretical/modeling work (preferably those with programming experience, but all are welcome) of stellar astrophysics to work on the aforementioned project.
The involved student will learn about:
(a) the structure and evolution/cooling of white dwarfs.
(b) how to construct white dwarf luminosity function from the cooling curves of white dwarfs.
(c) how to infer the age and star formation history of our Galaxy from the luminosity function.
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Any
Advisor: William Cochran
Research Project: Extrasolar planets, solar system
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Familiarity with computers (text editing, basic UNIX commands, simple programming) preferred
Advisor: Julie Comerford
Research Project: Observations of supermassive black holes in galaxies
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Any
Advisor: Neal Evans
Research Project: Star/Planet Formation; Working with infrared data from the Herschel Space Telescope. Assisting with collecting/archiving datasets, plus other science projects based on interests.
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Computer competence required; knowledge of IDL a plus but not required.
Advisor: Keely Finkelstein
Research Project: Star Formation and evolution in galaxies. Also possible projects in astronomy education research.
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Some computer/programming experience preferred
Advisor: Steven Finkelstein
Research Project: Discovering the most distant galaxies, and studying how they evolve with time, using large surveys such as CANDELS (candels.ucolick.org) and HETDEX (hetdex.org).
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Any
Advisor: Karl Gebhardt
Research Project: Black holes
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Any
Advisor: Gary Hill
Research Project: Instrumentation for the VIRUS instrument
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Interest in instrumentation. 10hr/week, 1 year committment.
Advisor: Dan Jaffe
Research Project: Optical technology development for Astronomy
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: After instrumentation course
Advisor: Shardha Jogee
Research Project: Formation and evolution of galaxies and black holes
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Preferably computer/programming experience, or a course on galaxies.
Advisor: Pawan Kumar
Research Project: Gamma-ray bursts and other topics related to stellar explosions
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Strong Theory preference
Advisor: John Lacy
Research Project: Data reduction and computer modeling of spectra
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Computer use
Advisor: David Lambert
Research Project: Stellar atmospheres; chemical composition of stars; chemical evolution of the universe
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Depends on specific project. Some experience with IRAF desirable.
Advisor: Roderik Overzier
Research Project: Astrophysics of Starbursts (SDSS, HST, VLT and Herschel data); High-z Galaxy Clusters (GALEX, VLT and HST data); Clustering of Radio Sources (SDSS, NVSS/FIRST data)
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Any (programming in IDL, python, or C(++), and data reduction following standard recipes and pipelines will be required)
Advisor: Edward Robinson
Research Project:
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Reducing and analyzing data
Advisor: John Scalo
Research Project:
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Some programming experience
Advisor: J. Craig Wheeler
Research Project: Supernovae (for example, a project to search the literature for supernovae with certain spectral features), gamma-ray bursts
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: ROTSE data
Advisor: Don Winget
Research Project: White dwarfs, open clusters, planets, debris disks
Research Term: Summer or Academic Year
Skills: Some programming or IRAF experience