Postdoctoral Fellowship: AAPF: Carbon Inheritance in Planets: What is the Evolutionary Pathway of Organic Species?

Abygail Waggoner is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Waggoner will use data from the James Webb Space Telescope to constrain chemical properties of the dusty disks around nascent stars, where planets form. Waggoner will model thousands of unique environments that can be host to such disks. The project will create an after-school STEM camp for elementary aged children, focusing on hands-on activities. Direct observations of the chemical abundances of the inner protoplanetary disk regions have only been recently possible. Waggoner will constrain properties of benzene gas, generate a new X-ray driven chemical network involving oxygen and carbon atoms and use modeled JWST and ALMA spectra to identify commonalties in the chemical evolution of protoplanetary systems. The development and implementation of the new spectroscopic analysis tools and theoretical models proposed in this project will aid in increasing our understanding of molecular inheritance from disks to planets. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2602399 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Abygail Waggoner | Institution: Waggoner, Abygail R, Madison, WI | Award Amount: $330,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2602399 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2602399.html