Grad Student Spotlights

I am a second-year Cornell Astronomy Ph.D. student interested in the surface processes of icy satellites. Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, is densely covered in thousand-kilometer-long fractures called double ridges. Despite the prevalence of double ridges on Europa’s surface, there has yet to be a consensus on what formation process creates the fractures. In preparation for the arrival of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to Europa in 2029, I am using finite element modeling to help narrow down which hypotheses for double ridge formation are the most plausible. I’m also a graduate affiliate of the Europa Imaging System (EIS) team for NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission, where I create trajectory analysis products to best help the science team with mission planning. Farther into the solar system, Titan, an icy moon of Saturn, has large lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane. I numerically model wind-driven waves on Titan’s lakes and seas as part of a larger effort to understand wave-driven erosion on the shoreline of the lakes and seas.

Before coming to Cornell in 2022, I earned my B.S. in geology from North Carolina State University (19’) and two minors in meteorology and graphic communications. While at N.C. State, I researched Iapetus, an icy moon of Saturn. I also interned at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL), where I researched Mars. I then earned my M.S. in Applied Geological Sciences (21’) at the University of Alaska Anchorage studying broad-scale tectonics on Europa and how geologic features resemble artifacts of plate tectonics. After completing my M.S., I returned to APL and worked with the EIS team on science operation center (SOC) development, science communication, flyby planning software development, and instrument calibration.

Outside of academia, I gravitate toward artistic activities and am involved in photography, painting, and pottery. I also enjoy hiking, rock climbing, kayaking, listening to records, and spending time with my two cats, Bowie and Mercury.

Hi, I’m Diana! I use any pronouns (they/he/she, ranked in order of preference). I’m a first-year grad student studying astronomy at Cornell. My main research interests are in exoplanets, stars, and habitability, although it would be nice to try to meet an alien. Historically, I’ve used big datasets such as those collected by TESS and Gaia, statistics, and Monte Carlo methods to try to answer questions around planetary architecture and formation, but I’m constantly expanding my toolbox and my horizons. I’m also an NSF GRFP fellow.

I grew up in New York City (Queens!!!), and went to high school at the Bronx High School of Science. Before entering college, I interned at the American Museum of Natural History, working with Dr. Nathan Leigh to better understand the initial conditions of gravitationally chaotic three-body star simulations. I then moved to Philadelphia to attend Drexel University for undergrad, where I majored in physics with an astrophysics concentration and minored in sociology. There, I produced visualizations of early stellar formation simulations intended to resemble real observations as a means of assessing simulation codes, under Dr. Stephen McMillan’s supervision. For my senior thesis, I made the jump with information science professor Dr. Jake Ryland Williams into the intersection of data science, statistical physics, and computational linguistics. I broke down tens of thousands of digitized books and corrupted them in ways that would disgust the average book-lover to determine where a linguistic law held true, where it broke down, and why. I switched back to astrophysics after graduation, when I entered Columbia University’s Bridge to the PhD in STEM program to work with Dr. David Kipping. Over two years, I led a massive (still ongoing) project to estimate the minimum eccentricities of hundreds of TESS-detected exoplanets orbiting M-dwarfs without radial velocity measurements, via Bayesian analysis.

When I’m not researching or doing homework, I’m usually writing stories, practicing Muay Thai, or playing video games like Fortnite and Kingdom Hearts. I also love talking about science, and drawing from pop culture to do so.

I am in my final year as a graduate student working on sub-millimeter observations of high-redshift galaxies. I am the current lead for Cornell's sub-millimeter grating spectrometer ZEUS-2 (the second generation z [redshift] and Early Universe Spectrometer). ZEUS-2 uses bolometer arrays for detectors, and recently two new arrays have been added to the instrument, operating in the 200 and 600 micron bands. I have led three observing runs at the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope.

I received undergraduate degrees in physics and astronomy from the University of Kansas in 2017. While there, I worked on experimental cosmology, in particular the large-scale statistics of galaxy peculiar velocities.

My personal website is www.rooneyworks.com

Research Focus

Advisor: Professor Gordon Stacey