4 May 2016

AAS Participates in Exhibition Highlighting NSF

Heather Bloemhard Vanderbilt University

On 26 April 2016, AAS participated in an exhibition to highlight projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Four exemplary scientists from Columbia University joined us on Capitol Hill to share their NSF-supported work in a presentation titled "Astronomy at Columbia: Advancing Scientific Knowledge, Diversifying the Scientific Workforce."

Dr. Marcel Agüeros and Alejandro Núñez, a PhD student at Columbia, presented their work on determining the ages of stars, research funded by an NSF CAREER grant, "Fixing Stellar Chronometers With Open Clusters." Dr. Agüeros is also the principal investigator of an NSF grant to broaden participation — the grant is titled "A Bridge to the Future." A Bridge to the Future funds participants in the Columbia Bridge Program. Julia Gross, a Bridge alumna who has begun work on her PhD at Columbia, and Deivid Ribeiro, a current Bridge student who will be staying at Columbia for his PhD, discussed how the program has impacted their academic careers.

Pictured Left to Right: Marcel Agüeros, Deivid Ribeiro, Alejandro Núñez, and Julia Gross.

Pictured Left to Right: Marcel Agüeros, Deivid Ribeiro, Alejandro Núñez, and Julia Gross.

This exhibition is organized every spring by the Coalition for National Science Funding, an alliance of over 140 organizations who are supportive of increasing national investment in the NSF. The goal of the exhibition is to highlight the breadth of the NSF portfolio for members of Congress.

Dr. Agüeros wrote a synopsis for Columbia's Department of Astronomy website.