Melanie Rowland

I am a final year Astronomy Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin (expected graduation Spring or Summer 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.