This fall we’re teaming up with the second annual Tower Grove Park Astronomy Festival and shooting for the stars! Join us at St. Louis Public Radio on September 29th for an evening of true, personal stories about how looking to the skies can help us find what we’re searching for within.
Hosted by Gabe Montesanti and Sam Lyons
Stories by:
Dr. Pamela Gay is an astronomer, technologist, and creative focused on using new media to engage people in learning and doing science. She is perhaps most well-known for the Astronomy Cast podcast. For 17 years, she and Fraser Cain have been taking their audience on a facts-based journey of through this universe we all share. She also hosts the Escape Velocity Space News show, and streams on Twitch, where she invites her audience to do science with her. In the summer of 2019, she used this plate form to invite the public to help her and the CosmoQuest community map out the asteroid Bennu. Together they made more than 17 million measurements of rocks, boulders, and craters as they helped the OSIRIS-REx team find a safe place to collect a sample to bring back to Earth... And that sample came back September 24! While Pamela currently works from her keyboard with spacecraft data, she got her start working with telescopes, and has had the chance to use some of the largest telescopes on Earth to observe things that flicker and flare in the night. When midwestern skies allow, she'll still carry her personal telescope out to the sidewalk to share the night with her neighbors and the occasional swooping owl.
Alex Chen is a theoretical astrophysicist working at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the environments surrounding extreme objects in the universe including neutron stars and black holes. Alex writes computer codes to simulate these objects on supercomputers, a career he shares with his wife, and they moved to St. Louis in 2022. They have a 9 month old little baby and are now learning to juggle research, teaching, and parental responsibilities.
Paul Byrne received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in geology from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC on NASA's MESSENGER mission, the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. He later joined the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, and then moved to North Carolina State University as an assistant and then associate professor. He became Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis in 2021. His research focuses on comparative planetology—comparing and contrasting the surfaces and interiors of planetary bodies, including Earth, to understand planetary phenomena generally. His research projects span the Solar System from Mercury to Pluto and, increasingly, to the study of extrasolar planets. He uses remotely sensed data, numerical and physical models, and fieldwork on Earth to understand why planets look the way they do.
Kirsten Siebach is an Assistant Professor in the Rice University Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and calls herself a Martian Geologist. She is currently a member of the Science and Operations Teams for the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance and the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, and previously worked on the science and engineering teams for the Phoenix Lander and the two Mars Exploration Rovers. She uses the images, chemistry, and other data that the rovers send back from Mars to study ancient environments on the Red Planet and compare them to ancient and modern environments on Earth. She received her bachelor’s degree in Earth and Planetary Science and Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. in Geology from Caltech. Kirsten is actively engaged in science education and outreach and loves sharing the stories and images from Mars with students and the public. She has been interviewed in multiple documentaries and TV shows related to Mars exploration and has given over one hundred talks to students and interest groups around the world. Outside of professional interests, she loves travel and photography (on Earth as well as Mars), and enjoys swimming, hiking, and puzzles.