Angeli Sandoval: New Opportunity from Far Away Worlds

This week NYSG is highlighting one of our New York Space Grant (NYSG) Women in STEM (WiS) Fellowship recipients, Angeli Sandoval. Angeli is an astrophysics master’s student at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Angeli was awarded the WiS Fellowship, which is competitively awarded up to $5,000 in research fellowship(s) to students in STEM working on undergraduate or graduate research projects. The intent of this fellowship is to support students working on NASA-related projects in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The intent of this award is to attract, recruit and train U.S. citizens, especially women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities, for careers in aerospace science and technology. 

 During the NYSG Women in STEM Fellowship, Angeli was able to develop her exoplanet research on system EPIC 212813907. This planetary system is particularly interesting to Angeli because it has a K dwarf as the host star with two gas-giant companions orbiting it. This is a rather unusual occurrence to for a system to have more than one transiting gas giant planet orbiting the same star. Existing fundamental parameters such as: planet mass, orbital period, and planet density are due to radial velocity data, obtained with the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) and NEID spectrographs, photometric date, obtained by the Kepler’s K2 mission. 

Angeli was tasked with creating a coding framework to feed this data into a 2-planet Keplerian model, which then used a Hamiltonian Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm method to calculate the best-fit planetary parameters. Angeli mentioned that the coding framework was very time-consuming due to python compatibility issues. This led to much time spent troubleshooting for the code to work properly. Once those issues were resolved, multiple instrumental data sets using a Gaussian process was used in order to remove signals due to stellar activity.  

 When Angeli was spending a time away from coding, she would attend weekly meetings with other students and mentors working on similar projects. This time would be spent by sharing project updates, inquiring, or troubleshooting coding-related issues. During this time with mentors, Angeli was able to greatly improve her coding, analytical, and statistical skills under the mentorship of Dr. Caleb Cañas. Those weekly meetings also facilitated collaboration between various students and scientists at different career-levels, while allowing Angeli to observe much of the research that was taking place at different institutions.  

 Upon the completion of the fellowship, Angeli had the privilege of being part of the NEID research proposal that was recently awarded. She will continue her research and work with Dr. Caleb Cañas as he is now officially her master’s thesis advisor. Angeli will also have the opportunity to observe and visit the Keck Planet Finder (KPF) at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii this summer, where she is excited to experience the operation of a world-class telescope. With this continued success, Angeli started the work necessary to have her findings published in a peer-reviewed journal.  

Angeli credits the NYSG WiS Fellowship in aiding her improved technical and problem-solving skills by tackling challenging problems in astronomy, while improving her professional skills through collaboration with other exoplanet peers and experts. She notes that these invaluable skills are necessary for every scientist looking to solve a piece of the puzzle, which is our universe and share it with the world. Angeli also made a point that the NYSG WiS Fellowship solidified her desire to continue exoplanet research, and it has opened opportunities for academic, professional, and personal growth. She hopes to utilize here experience to apply and receive admittance into an Astronomy or Astrophysics PhD program this fall.