2020… the year of zoom, sourdough starters, and finding your bubble has brought with it many challenges, but also many new joys. For us, a major new joy is three new members joining the Milky Way Laboratory! We have an awesome new postdoc, Dr. Daniel Walker, and two first year graduate students, Dani Lipman and Yiyan Kuang.

Dr. Walker joins us from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow after graduating with his PhD from Liverpool John Moores University where he did his PhD with Dr. Steve Longmore. Dan will be leading the kinematics, spectral line analysis, and Bayesian distance estimator for “3-D CMZ: Unveiling the Structure of our Galaxy’s Central Molecular Zone.” 

Dani Lipman joins us as a first year graduate student. Last year Dani was on Fulbright Research Award in China to study faculty participation in science outreach, before, y’know, Covid-19 had anything to say about that. Dani completed her Bachelor’s in 2019 at the University of Iowa. She will be leading the dust extinction study as part of “3-D CMZ: Unveiling the Structure of our Galaxy’s Central Molecular Zone.”

Yiyan Kuang joins us as a first year graduate student. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in 2020 from Allegheny College. Yiyan is experience in numerical simulations and has studied the evolution of star clusters using N-body simulations. He will bring this expertise to studying the formation of the pre-stellar Core Mass Function (CMF), and comparing simulations and observations.

Welcome Yiyan, Dani, and Dan!