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Five US-based Participating Scientists selected for XARM

11 May 2018

Following a highly competitive peer-reviewed selection process, five US-based scientists will be joining the Japanese-led X-ray Astronomy Recovery Mission (XARM) as Participating Scientists (PS). These scientists will become members of the US XARM Science Team and will contribute their expertise to the pre-launch science planning of the mission. They will be introduced to the rest of the XARM team later this month at the science kick-off meeting in Nara, Japan. The five PS and their investigations are listed below.

  • Lia Corrales, currently an Einstein Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Corrales is a graduate of Harvey Mudd College and obtained her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2014, where she held a NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellowship (NESSF) grant. After postdoctoral stints at MIT and as an Einstein Fellow, she will begin a Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor later this year, where she will perform her investigation "Interstellar dust grain mineralogy with high resolution spectra of dust scattering halos."

  • Erin Kara, a Hubble Fellow at the University of Maryland. Dr. Kara graduated from Barnard College and obtained her Ph.D. from Cambridge University (UK) in 2015 prior to becoming a Hubble Fellow. Her investigation "XARM observations of black hole accretion flows" will follow her transition from Hubble Fellow to faculty member at MIT in 2019.

  • Jon Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he will carry out his investigation "Revealing black hole outflows and inflows with XARM." He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 2002. After three years as an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, he took up an assistant professor position at the University of Michigan, where he became a full professor in 2015.

  • Paul Plucinsky, senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. A graduate of MIT, Dr. Plucinsky obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1993, a position that included a two-year stint at Max-Planck Institut (MPE). He settled at SAO upon graduating and became Operations and Science Support Group Leader in 2015. His investigation into supernova remnants is called "XARM Resolve Spectra of 1E 0102.2-7219 and N132D."

  • Irina Zhuravleva, currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University working with Steve Allen. After receiving her M.Sc. in St Petersburg, Russia, Dr. Zhuravleva obtained her Ph.D. in 2011 at Ludwig-Maximilian University and Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, where she also spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow prior to coming to the Kavli Institute at Stanford in 2012. Her investigation "Gas dynamics in nearby galaxy clusters, groups and giant elliptical galaxies: velocity amplitude, anisotropy and power spectra" will be performed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where she has just accepted a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellowship.