Melanie Rowland, PhD

I just completed my PhD in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin and will be a postdoctral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History starting in the Fall of 2025. I’m interested in characterizing brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets to understand both their formation and evolution histories and the physical processes occuring in their atmospheres that drive our observations. I primarily use atmospheric retrievals (CHIMERA, Line et al. 2014) and forward modeling (Sonora family of models, PICASO, and VIRGA) to characterize their composition, cloud properties, mass, radius, and dynamics.