Research Scientists
John Brewer
John is the Science Lead for the 100 Earths Project
and Associate Research Scientist at Yale who will spend part of his time at Columbia University, closer to his home in NYC.
John published catalogs of spectroscopic parameters for about 3000 stars (Brewer et al. 2016, Brewer & Fischer 2018)
with a technique he developed and calibrated against asteroseismic data to give a much-needed improvement in
spectroscopic surface gravity measurements (Brewer et al. 2015).
You can follow his research from his web page!
John was a founding member of
Planet Hunters, and
a guru for the group on everything from computer system administration to data reduction code.
John also developed "CHIRON TOOLS"
(Brewer et al. 2014), an integrated web-based software suite for target scheduling and observing.
If you are a CHIRON
user, you have John to thank for the beautiful interface that has streamlined scheduling and observing
(saving 1-2 hours per night of previously lost time). He is also leading the effort on an even more
ambitions project for EXPRES,
which will be publicly available on github soon.
John has unique expertise in database management. He is social force in the department and an
avid bicyclist. He also makes astonishingly good ice cream, keeping his colleagues happy!
Andrew Szymkowiak
Andy is a Senior Research Scientist in the Astronomy Department at Yale University, and advisor to the Exoplanets Instrumentation group. He is a classic MIT-trained rocket scientist and out of the box thinker!
