Summer 2025

The BOBA Lab was busy this summer! We had 5 Amherst College students—Vanshika Gupta, Joe Leckie, Varsha Palaniyandy, Meadow Perez, and Shea Stabila—participate in the SURF program, plus 2 students joining from UMass (Meghan Mcbride and Jackson Weatherbee), 1 student (Dominic Li) who helped update this website, and returning postbac researcher (Kinsey Cronin) and PhD student (Leo Barba)!

We again started SURF with a one-week astro “bootcamp” jointly held with a number of other astro labs in the Five Colleges, before students started working on their own projects.

Meadow studied whether dwarf galaxies located in cosmic voids have higher or lower contents of heavy elements than dwarf galaxies outside cosmic voids. Joe and Varsha wrote a software pipeline to infer the 3D shapes of dwarf galaxies inside and outside voids from 2D “on-sky” measurements. Vanshika and Shea learned a technique for measuring the star formation rates of dwarf galaxies, and tested the effects of making different assumptions about how dwarf galaxies formed their stars in the past.

Along with science, we once again held a bunch of social lab activities. We had a movie night (we watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Prof Mia definitely did not cry) and a Lego day (we made a beautiful Milky Way art piece). We ended the summer on a high note, with a picnic potluck in the park (Leo handled the grill, and everyone brought delicious food)!