From July 20-26, Astronomy graduate students Brandon Radzom and Jessica Ranshaw participated in the 2025 Carl Sagan Summer Workshop held at Caltech's campus in Pasadena, CA.
The theme of the workshop was "Exoplanet Demographics", a subfield of exoplanets relevant to both Brandon's and Jessica's research, and the format included a mix of plenary talks from invited speakers, hands-on coding sessions, group projects and project presentations, poster sessions, and 90-second "POP" talks from attendees highlighting their posters. Brandon attended in person while Jessica attended remotely, but both students gave poster POP presentations on their work.
Brandon's poster, titled "Evidence for Primordial Alignment: Insights from Stellar Obliquity Measurements for Giants in Compact Systems", advertised his work constraining the orbital orientations of close-in gas giants known as hot Jupiters. Jessica's poster, titled "K2-232c: The Cold Jupiter That Redefined the Origins of Hot and Warm Jupiters", showed off her recent discovery of a gas giant similar to our own Jupiter but with an inner giant companion. Their posters can be found on the workshop website here: https://nexsci.caltech.edu/workshop/2025/posters.shtml.
The College of Arts