Ashley Baker
, Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology
Research Focus
About Ashley
I work on aiding ground-based exoplanet characterization surveys through new instrumentation and a better understanding of the impact of Earth’s atmosphere, or tellurics, on high-precision radial velocity measurements. The former includes developing higher throughput instruments for performing transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets to study their atmospheres as well as designing auxiliary spectrographs for radial velocity instruments that expand the survey’s spectral range to monitor key stellar activity signatures.
I am currently a 51 Peg b Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech working with Dimitri Mawet in the Exoplanet Technology Lab (https://etlab.caltech.edu/) and also am a member of the Keck Planet Finder (KPF – https://exoplanets.caltech.edu/kpf/) and the Palomar Radial Velocity Instrument teams. I earned my bachelors degree in physics from UNC Chapel Hill in 2014 then completed my PhD in the Physics & Astronomy department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.
Honors
2020-Present - 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow
2019-2020 - The Zaccheus Daniel Graduate Fellowship
NSF Graduate Research Fellow (2016-2019)
Education
Postdoc
Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, 07/2020 - 07/2023
Ph.D.
Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, 05/2020
Master's
Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, 05/2016
Bachelor's
Physics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 05/2014
