Moving back to Austin!
I’m moving back to Austin! I’ll be starting a research fellow job at UT Austin Astronomy Department on February 1, 2020 (roughly three months from the writing of this post), and relocating to Austin a week or more before that. I’ll complete my job at the Kepler/K2 Guest Observer office in mid-January 2020.
It will have been a great 3 years living in Northern California, and we’ll miss the friends and family and cycling. Working for Kepler at NASA Ames has been transformative. It’s a privilege to play a small part in what will be remembered as one of the most successful NASA missions of all time. I’ve built tons of skills along the way. I’m proud of the work I did at Kepler GO, and I still have a few months to continue contributing to our lightkurve framework and support our large community of scientists. Our entirely public archival data will continue to produce new discoveries for decades to come.
My new role will focus on understanding exoplanet atmospheres. Now that we’ve discovered thousands of planets with Kepler/K2 and TESS, the challenge becomes characterizing the thin ring of particles that envelope the surface. We want to know if exoplanets have water vapor in their atmospheres, for example. The mere detection of this thin ring remains a huge challenge, but has become barely possible in the last few years. Some of my work at Kepler centered on disambiguating these signals on mottled stars. At UTexas I’ll be working with Assistant Professor Caroline Morley, who is an expert in the theory of these atmospheres. I’m jazzed to join her group! The Department has many new faculty since I left in 2015, and I’m looking forward to engaging with the large and creative community there. Above all, I will be happy to take a leading role in publishing innovative work that pushes the frontiers both scientifically and technologically.
The return to Austin will also be a homecoming of sorts. I lived there for over six years while a graduate student, moving away after my PhD in May of 2015. I met my now-wife there, and we held our wedding ceremony in Central Texas two years ago. We loved it there! Moving back to Austin was a long-term aspiration for us, especially since we thought it’d be a solid and familiar place to raise a kid. We were happy to get the timing to work, since February of 2020 lines up with when we are hoping to transition our then 8-month-old to daycare. Remarkably we’re on a 2–3 year waiting list for the popular UTexas Child Development Center, so let me know if you have any special insights on Daycare in Austin.
Any mention of moving back to Austin would be incomplete without a shout-out to the great things there. Breakfast tacos from Tacodeli, Veracruz All Natural, and Bouldin Creek. Playing music in renegade street bands. Cycling the Texas Hill Country. Swing dance and two-step. Music galore. Swimming holes. Outdoor patios. Tons of friends and good people we’ve known for up to a decade now. See ya’ll soon, or else come plan a visit to the Lone Star State.

