People behind Pandora
The Pandora team is made up of various researchers and engineers from across NASA institutions, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, multiple research centers and universities, encompassing both senior and early-career researchers.
Elisa Quintana: Principle Investigator
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Jessie Dotson: Deputy PI
Dr. Jessie Dotson is the Pandora Deputy Principal Investigator. Dotson has supported a variety of NASA missions in different roles including the SOFIA Instrument Scientist, Director of the Kepler Guest Observer Office, Deputy Science Office Director for Kepler, and the Kepler/K2 Project Scientist. In addition, she served six years as the Branch Chief for Astrophysics at NASA Ames Research Center. Her current areas of research include planetary defense, stellar activity, and exoplanet demographics.
Knicole Colon: Project Scientist
Dr. Knicole Colón is a research astrophysicist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She has held various roles on NASA missions over the years, most recently serving as the Pandora Project Scientist, TESS Project Scientist, and JWST Deputy Project Scientist for Exoplanet Science. Her research interests include the study of extreme exoplanets, like the super puffy planet KELT-11b, the disintegrating planet K2-22b, and planets on highly eccentric orbits like HD 80606b. Her experience includes using optical and infrared and ground and space facilities to study such exoplanets.
Thomas Barclay: Deputy Project Scientist
Dr. Thomas Barclay is the Pandora Deputy Project Scientist and is the mission science lead for the observatory. Dr. Barclay has over a decade of experience on NASA spaceflight projects. He previously led the Guest Investigator Program for NASA's Kepler mission and served in various roles (including Deputy Project Scientist) for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. In addition to his Pandora role, he is the Operation Scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. His research interests are in the detection and characterization of transiting exoplanets. He holds the distinction of having led the discovery of the smallest known exoplanet, the Moon-sized Kepler-37 b.
Jordan Karburn
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James Mason: Mission Operations Support
Dr. James Mason is an expert in small satellites, having worked on over 20 of them in the past decade. He was heavily involved in every aspect of the highly successful MinXSS CubeSats and is the Principal Investigator of the recently awarded Sun Coronal Ejection Tracker (SunCET) CubeSat. His role on Pandora is to provide advice about development and operation of small satelites, connections to other teams, and guidance on useful tools that have been used on other projects.
Christina Hedges: Data Processing Lead
Dr. Christina Hedges is the Lead Pipeline Scientist for the Pandora smallsat mission, where she is tasked with building the science pipeline to extract transmission spectra from the raw data. Dr. Hedges is also the Deputy Lead for the General Investigator Office for NASA’s TESS mission at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she leads a team of scientists to support the astronomy community. Previously, Dr. Hedges has worked as a support scientist for the NASA Kepler/K2 mission at NASA Ames Research Center. Her key science interests are exoplanet discovery and characterization and stellar activity, and her work focuses on novel data analysis methods for working close to the noise limit of space-based telescopes. Dr. Hedges recieved her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2018.
Benjamin Rackham: Stellar Contamination Working Group Lead
Ben is a Research Scientist at MIT, working on the detection and characterization of transiting exoplanets. He is interested primarily in small exoplanets around nearby small stars that afford the best opportunities for detailed atmospheric characterization, including searches for biosignatures with near-future telescopes. Starspots can mimic or mask atmospheric features in transmission spectra, and so he also studies new approaches for constraining stellar photospheric heterogeneity and disentangling stellar and planetary signals in transmission spectra.
Daniel Apai: Exoplanet Working Group Lead
Daniel Apai is an astrophysicist specializing in studies of extrasolar planets with the long-term goal of identifying planetary systems capable of supporting life. He is working on the interface of planetary science and astronomy and holds an appointment as Professor at the Steward Observatory and the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of The University of Arizona. Daniel is currently the Interim Associate Dean for Research at the College of Science at The University of Arizona. He is the Principal Investigator of the NASA-funded astrobiology team Alien Earths and the Nautilus Space Observatory mission concept.
Jason Rowe: Auxiliary Science Lead
Dr. Jason Rowe received his PhD at the University of British Columbia for his work on measuring the reflectively of extra-solar planets using photometric measurements from the Canadian MOST Satellite. After his PhD Dr. Rowe joined the Kepler team as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow contributing towards the first Kepler discoveries and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement medal for his work on measuring fundamental parameters of exoplanets. Dr. Rowe then joined the SETI Institute as a research scientist and member of Kepler Science office and his continued work on exoplanets lead to the discovery of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of main-sequence stars and bulk validation of 812 extrasolar planets. During his tenure at SETI he was awarded his second NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement medal. Dr. Rowe then joined the JWST NIRISS Instrument team at Université de Montréal to develop techniques and tools to measure the atmospheres on extrasolar planets. Dr. Rowe is currently a Canada Research Chair in Extrasolar Planet Astrophysics, his current research goals are to determine what properties make a planet ‘Earth-like’ and whether there is life beyond Earth. He has authored and co-authored over 200 publications with over 16000 total citations.
Aurora Kesseli: Archive Scientist
Dr. Aurora Kesseli is a Staff Scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and works to support the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Her research aims to understand how close in gas giant planets formed and evolved over time, and what dynamical processes that are occuring in their exotic atmospheres. Aurora mainly uses transmission and emission spectroscopy, performed with high resolution optical and infrared ground-based spectrographs, to answer these questions. As a member of the PANDORA team, Aurora will work on creating a data archiving interface to facilitate easy data access for the community and oversee PANDORA data releases.
Robert Zellem: Ground-based Sub-working Group Lead
Dr. Rob Zellem is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. His research focuses on the characterization of the atmospheres of exoplanets using both the transit and direct imaging methods. He is the Ground-Based Sub-working Group co-lead for Pandora, whereby he is coordinating ground-based observations to support both the operations and scientific interpretation of Pandora data. Rob is also the Deputy Project Scientist for Communications for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Project Scientist for Exoplanet Watch, a citizen science project to observe transiting exoplanets, a co-lead for NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), and a science team member for the NASA’s CASE contribution to ESA’s Ariel mission. Previously, Rob worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he was a member of the Roman Coronagraph Project Science Team and its Science Calibrations Lead.
Natalie Allen
Natalie Allen is a PhD candidate and NSF graduate research fellow at Johns Hopkins University, working with Dr. Néstor Espinoza and Prof. David Sing. She is interested in the observation and characterization of exoplanet atmospheres for planets of all sizes, as well as the disentanging of stellar contamination signals from said atmospheric observations. She is working on a retrieval framework to utilize Pandora’s long observations of noisy stars to model multiple contaminated transmission spectra simultaneously, using each transit as a “snapshot” of the star to build a persistent stellar surface to phase and evolve in order to maximize the chance of unearthing the underlying planet’s signal.
Jessie Christiansen
Jessie Christiansen is the science lead at the NASA Exoplanet Archive, and interested in exoplanet populations and what they can tell us about planet formation, migration, and evolution. She previously worked on the NASA Kepler, K2, and TESS missions.
Néstor Espinoza
Dr. Néstor Espinoza is an Assistant Astronomer and the Mission Scientist for Exoplanet Science at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). His research focuses on exoplanet characterization, in particular on transiting exoplanet atmospheric characterization with JWST. Néstor is the lead developer of several open-source software packages such as juliet and the transitspectroscopy packages. As a Mission Scientist, Néstor oversees the exoplanet science that happens with the observatories that STScI supports, all the way from proposal preparation, data acquisition and quality to the strategic vision of the Institute in the field for the future.
Trevor Foote
Mr. Trevor Foote is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University and NASA FINESST fellow, working with Prof. Nikole Lewis. His research interests include characterization of exoplanet atmospheres, especially toward the goal of identifying potentially habitable planets and detecting bio-signatures. He is also interested in detector development for use in the analysis of these far-off worlds. While working as a job shadow for Pandora’s Deputy Project Scientist, Tom Barclay, Trevor has worked on development of a 2D image simulator for the near-IR detector and the creation of the mission’s observation scheduler. His current project for Pandora includes the development and execution of characterization testing for the near-IR detector and the creation of data reference products for use in the data processing pipeline.
Nguyen Fuda
Fuda Nguyen is a graduate student working with Prof. Daniel Apai at the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona and a science team member of Pandora. Fuda’s work focuses on exoplanet atmospheres and understanding their evolution with time-resolved observation. His current work utilizes TESS data to assess rotational modulation of brown dwarfs and infer potential atmospheric morphologies. He is excited with the prospect of using Pandora to study ultracool atmospheres, particularly the nature of polar vortices and zonal circulation on these atmospheres with simultaneous spectrophotometry enabled by Pandora.
Emily Gilbert
Dr. Emily Gilbert is a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Exoplanet Exploration Program office. Her research focuses on the detection and characterization of exoplanets around low mass stars using a variety of ground and spaced based facilities for her research. A large portion of her work uses data from NASA’s TESS mission to search for planets and characterize their host stars. Emily received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2022, and previously worked at Planet Labs on their fleet of Earth-imaging CubeSats. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University where she was a leader of the Brown CubeSat Team.
Tom Greene
Thomas Greene is an astrophysicist in the Space Science and Astrobiology Division at NASA's Ames Research Center. He is a co-investigator on the NIRCam and MIRI science instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope, and he is leading JWST guaranteed time programs to characterize the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets and protostars. Tom is leveraging his expertise with developing the NIRCam slitless spectroscopy mode to optimize Pandora's design, testing, calibrations, and operations. Before joining NASA, he worked at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center on NASA astrophysics missions. Prior to that, Tom was on the faculty of the University of Hawaii where he was a support astronomer and later Director of the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona.
Kelsey Hoffman
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Rae Holcomb
Rae Holcomb is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine, and a current Graduate Student Shadow on the Pandora Mission team. Her research focuses on how to use the intersection of stellar activity studies and radial velocity exoplanet science to improve our understanding of host stars and the planets that orbit them. She has a particular interest in stellar rotation and M dwarf activity. Previously, she developed the open source tool SpinSpotter for identifying rotating stars from photometric surveys, and she is the lead of the TESS Rotation Collaboration, an upcoming community data challenge to improve stellar rotation periods recovered from the TESS sample. With the Pandora team, Rae is designing commissioning software and developing the data reduction pipeline.
Ben Hord
Ben Hord is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park and will transition to a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in support of the Pandora Mission in September 2023. He works primarily with TESS data, modeling photometric time series as well as detecting, validating, and characterizing planets with a particular focus on hot Jupiters. In addition to planet detection and characterization, Ben also works on prioritizing targets for follow up atmospheric observations with JWST and other observatories. As a team member on Pandora, he supports the identification of prime targets for the observatory and will contribute to the mission’s data processing pipeline.
Aishwarya Iyer
Dr. Aishwarya Iyer is a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center. Her research focuses on stellar atmospheric characterization, acquiring fundamental properties of low mass stars. She also has expertise in retrievals and Gaussian Process based inference techniques. She is also interested in stellar surface heterogeneities and their influence on planetary atmospheric properties. For Pandora science, she will contribute with a robust stellar characterization modeling framework to effectively decouple interaction signals with planetary data in order to ultimately understand planetary atmospheres.
Veselin Kostov
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Nikole Lewis
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Andrew Mann
Andrew Mann is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the fundamental properties of low-mass or young stars, as well as the planets that orbit them. He is the PI of the Zodiacal Exoplanets in Time (ZEIT) and co-PI of the TESS Hunt for Young and Maturing Exoplanets (THYME) surveys, both of which focus on the discovery, characterization, and demographics of transiting planets in young (5-800 Myr) associations. He also studies the atmospheres of young planets with HST, JWST, and ground-based facilities.
Megan Weiner Mansfield
Megan Weiner Mansfield is a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow working with Professor Dániel Apai at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. Megan’s research focuses on the spectroscopic characterization of exoplanet atmospheres. She uses a variety of ground-based and space-based observations to study planetary formation, physics, chemistry, and habitability. Megan received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2021, where she performed spectroscopic observations and modeling of highly irradiated exoplanets, ranging in size from hot terrestrial planets to ultra-hot Jupiters.
Brett Morris
Brett Morris is an astronomer by training, and software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. At STScI, he contributes to several open-source software projects with the goal of enabling cutting-edge observations of exoplanets and their host stars with JWST, Roman, and beyond. His research develops Bayesian inference techniques to investigate the physics of exoplanet atmospheres via space-based observations, with an emphasis on mitigating confounding signals from stellar atmospheres.
Greg Mosby
Greg Mosby is a lead detector scientist for Pandora. Dr. Mosby is also a detector scientist on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope project science team. In addition to Pandora, he is a collaborator on additional small space-based and ground-based missions. His research interests include near-infrared detectors, astronomical instrumentation, and applications of machine learning to observational astronomy, particularly in challenging applications where signal-to-noise is limiting.
Susan Mullally
Dr. Susan Mullally is the Mission Scientist for the Data Science Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute and is Deputy PI for the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. Her research focuses on exoplanets, binary stars and stellar variability, with an eye towards finding exoplanets similar to those in our own solar system. Previously she was a member of the Kepler Science Office, worked as a data scientist for the MAST, and worked as a Project Scientist for JWST.
Elizabeth Newton
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Josh Pepper
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Josh Schlieder
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Kevin Stevenson
Dr. Kevin Stevenson is a Staff Astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). He enjoys working in the phase space overlapping planetary sciences, astrophysics, and astrobiology. He is the PI of CHAMPs, an interdisciplinary research team whose goal is to understand if M-dwarf planets can support life and how best to characterize them. He is also the PI of a large JWST Cycle 1 program to determine the prevalence of atmospheres around terrestrial planets orbiting nearby M-dwarf stars.
Pete Supsinskas
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Lindsey Wiser
Lindsey Wiser is a current Graduate Student Shadow with the Pandora mission. She is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University, where she is advised by Dr. Mike Line. Her research interests include modeling and characterizing exoplanet atmospheres observed with space-based telescopes. Currently, she is focused on analyzing transit observations with JWST and identifying population-level trends in giant planet atmospheres. With Pandora, Lindsey is helping develop the instrument commissioning plan and helping to manage external communications activities. In addition to her science, Lindsey is active in space policy and advocacy initiatives.
Allison Youngblood
Allison Youngblood is a research astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center focused on characterizing low-mass stars and their activity in the ultraviolet. She leads a large Hubble Space Telescope program to characterize the high-energy radiation of the JWST Cycle 1 transiting exoplanet host stars. She also serves as the deputy project scientist for the TESS mission.