Staff Directory

Nicole is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Columbia Astronomy Department. She received a dual BS degree in astronomy and physics from the Pennsylvania State University. As part of the Schiminovich Astrophysics and Instrumentation Lab, Nicole works on the mask-guider system for the FIREBall-2 mission and the optical design/commissioning of the IFU spectrograph CHaS.

Marisa is an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering student from Houston, Texas. She is excited to be working in a lab where she can explore her interest in astrophysics and instrumentation. Marisa is an Ambassador for Meade Instruments, and at Columbia, she is an active member of BlueShift. Marisa also serves as Secretary of Columbia Women's Water Polo, gives campus tours as a member of the Undergraduate Recruitment Committee, and makes ceramics with the Barnard Clay Collective. She is also Publicity Director of WKCR FM NY, where she hosts a variety of shows including sports talk radio, bluegrass, and underground East Coast hip hop.

Ioana is an undergraduate student at Columbia College, majoring in Astrophysics and Computer Science. She is currently the president of Blueshift, Columbia's undergraduate astronomy club. Ioana is working on ChaS (and occasionally FIREBall).  In her research, she is bringing together her love for instrumentation and computational astrophysics. Ioana is also passionate about hiking, photography, and anime.

Professor Schiminovich received his B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. Before his return to Columbia as a professor in 2004, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Caltech and a visiting research scientist at Yale. Since 1997 he has been a lead scientist on the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) project. He has also maintained several close collaborations, particularly with researchers at Caltech, LAM/France, JHU and the University of Arizona.

Someone needs to send me a bio.

Barbara is a graduate student in the Physics Department at Columbia. Before moving to New York, she got her B.S. in Physics at Yale and spent a gap year at MIT's LIGO lab. As an undergrad, she spent a summer at CERN and did research in atomic physics for two years. At Columbia, she’s been part of the Physics Graduate Council and of Spectra, a student organization to promote diversity in physics. She is also a Next-Generation Fellow of APS's Physicists Coalition working on nuclear threat reduction advocacy. Barbara is supported by NASA's FINESST Fellowship and works on FIREBall and CHaS. When she’s not in the lab, you can find her rock climbing, knitting, playing her guitar, baking or geeking about politics.