The Team
Erik Ostlund -- Zooniverse Developer
Erik is a front-end web developer for the Zooniverse team at the University of Minnesota starting in August 2020.
Suhail Alnahari -- Data Science Researcher
Suhail is a researcher at the University of Minnesota who studies Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Crowdsourcing. He enjoys Machine Learning research, app development, sharing memes and playing soccer.
Yixian Zhang -- Researcher
Yixian is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and she is interested in all kinds of things going on beyond the Earth including what's happening on the Sun. She enjoys outdoor activities during her free time.
Lindsay Glesener -- Researcher
Lindsay is a researcher at the University of Minnesota who studies flares and jets that happen on the Sun. She enjoys astrophysics research, building telescopes, teaching, and spending time outdoors.
Navdeep Panesar -- Researcher
Navdeep is a research scientist at LMSAL/BAERI. She works on the dynamics and magnetic field evolution of different types of coronal jets and filaments. She enjoys gardening in her free time.
Sophie Musset -- Researcher
Sophie Musset is a Research Fellow at the European Space Agency. She is passionate about solar physics, coronal jets, X-ray telescopes and baking.
Mariana Jeunon -- Researcher
Mariana is a graduate student at Catholic University of America and currently works on modeling coronal mass ejections and solar magnetic flux tubes at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. In her free time, she enjoys playing tennis, photographing, painting and playing the piano.
Charlie Kapsiak -- Developer
Charlie is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, who works on processing solar images for the Zooniverse project.
Gregory D. Fleishman -- Researcher
Gregory Fleishman is a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His interests are Solar/Stellar/Space Physics and Theoretical Physics/Astrophysics (personal webpage)
Lucy Fortson -- Zooniverse Team
I am a co-founder of the Zooniverse platform and PI of the Zooniverse@UMN group. My research area is in Very High Energy gamma rays, but one of the reasons why I love working with the Zooniverse is it gives me a chance to play in other research areas - like with Solar data. I find it interesting that the Universe reuses physical processes on vastly different scales - the Solar Jets seen in this project can rise to thousands of kilometers above the Sun's surface while my work is with "jets" from galactic centers that can extend sometimes to a billion times a billion kilometers in scale! Even so, there are reasons to think that the same basic process is responsible for some of the physics of both types of jets.
Paloma Jol -- Researcher
Paloma is a Master student in Astronomy Research at Leiden University, who works on the statistical analysis of the solar jet properties as found by the Zooniverse project. In her master she focusses on stellar evolution and high energy astrophysics. She likes to cycle, bake desserts and bullet journalling.
Ramana Sankar -- Researcher
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities working on human-computer optimization problems and data science problems using neural networks on the Zooniverse citizen science platform. I am also working on using JunoCam images from the Juno spacecraft to classify cloud features in the jovian atmosphere using the Zooniverse platform coupled with a neural network. I did my Ph.D. in Space Sciences at Florida Tech, where my focus was on numerical simulations of Jupiter's atmosphere, specifically in modelling convective thunderstorms. The focus of my dissertation work was using the EPIC (Explicit Planetary Isentropic Coordinate) model to study convective water clouds on Jupiter which have been observed to grow into large storm complexes that result in planetary scale disturbances. I helped add a sub-grid scale moist convective scheme to the model so as to simulate these storms, and understand the structure of the deep jovian atmosphere.
Kekoa Lasko -- Researcher
Kekoa is a Research Assistant at the University of Minnesota. He is interested in studying astrophysics and mathematics, and can most often be found rock climbing.
Lestat Clemmer -- Researcher
Lestat is a researcher affiliated with the University of Minnesota who also works with the Small Satellite Research Lab, specializing in the development of the hardware and software of CubeSat particle detectors. They enjoy exploring new hobbies, making music, and playing video games.
