Casey Lam is a PhD candidate in the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley. With her advisor Prof. Jessica Lu, she is hunting for isolated stellar mass black holes. Although there are predicted to be 100 million of them floating throughout our own Milky Way galaxy, no detections have ever been confirmed. Casey’s research is focused on using a technique called gravitational microlensing to make a first detection of one of these elusive isolated stellar mass black holes, and her thesis work tackles this problem through a combination of simulation, modeling, and observation.
Casey Lam Research Talk – First to detect isolated Neuron Star
I grew up on a farm in Missouri where I learned firsthand the importance of taking care of the earth through sustainable farming. In graduate school, my background inspired me to use my statistical training to study regenerative agriculture and its potential to mitigate climate change. Regenerative agriculture may sequester substantial amounts of atmospheric carbon and restore soil health, making food systems more resilient to a changing climate. My research aims to identify weaknesses in soil carbon surveys, monitoring programs, and experiments, and provide better statistical tools to accomplish these tasks. I hope my work will contribute to more sustainable agriculture and a healthier planet.
I am a fourth year PhD candidate in the Statistics department at UC Berkeley. My research focuses on causal inference with applications in education and political science. I earned my Bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics, with a secondary in computer science, from Harvard. At Berkeley, I am co-chair of the Statistics Graduate Student Association’s Diversity Committee, am a Union (UAW 2865) Departmental Steward, and have a monthly column in the Berkeley Science Review blog, “STEMinism in the Spotlight,” where I interview women in STEM fields at UC Berkeley. Outside of Berkeley, I enjoy seeing live music, baseball and crafting (knitting, crocheting and weaving).
Andrew Shi is a PhD student in the department of mathematics. His research is in numerical methods for partial differential equations in the application area of computational fluid dynamics. In particular, his main project is on the subject of high-order shock tracking, which encompasses many fields in applied and computational mathematics such as numerical optimization and mesh generation. Prior to graduate school, he was a financial analyst in New York City. His Bachelor’s degree was also earned at UC Berkeley and he is originally from Dallas, TX.
