K. Azalee Bostroem

My Story

 

I am an LSSTC Catalyst Fellow at University of Arizona.  I am currently working on projects to characterize the massive stars that explode a supernovae (Type II).

I did my PhD work at UC Davis where I was a UC Presidents Pre-Professoriate Fellow at University of California, Davis. I was a  DiRAC fellow at University of Washington before moving to Arizona.

​

In my spare time, I volunteer for the Carpentries as an instructor. As an instructor I organize and teach programming skills to researchers to allow them to work more efficiently to create reproducible work. I currently organize the Software and Data Carpentry Workshop at the Winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. I am also the PI of a grant through the American Institute of Physics to develop Data Carpentry lessons for the astronomical community. Check out our new curriculum: Foundations of Astronomical Data Science! 

​

Prior to returning to graduate school, I spent 5 years as a Senior Research and Instrument Analyst at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). At STScI, I coordinated the calibration pipeline development of the two spectrographs on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST): the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS).  I also monitored the decline in sensitivity of the COS and STIS FUV and NUV detectors. At STScI, I began my work characterizing massive stars with spectra of the most massive stars R136 (the central starburst cluster of 30 Doradus).

In my remaining moments, explore on my bike, paddle board, climb, garden, and bake.