Well done, Isabel!

Isabel Angelo just completed her PhD on the effect of distant massive perturbers on planets. Isabel led a study discovering a distant giant planet companion to Kepler-1656b, which has an extremely ellipical orbit and worked with dynamicist Smadar Noaz to show that this companion is likely responsible for the inner planet's eccentricity. Isabel also worked with Megan Bedell to develop a machine learning framework to classify Gaia and Keck/HIRES spectra and search for binaries with overlapping spectral lines. She found that a technique based on a widely used spectral emulator called The Cannon was successful at classification but not at binary identification even when signal-to-noise is plentiful. Such detection methods should be possible, but Isabel's work points toward the need a need for different machine learning architectures. In the fall, Isabel will be starting a postdoc at the SETI institute.