Dr. Sierra Casten Successfully Defends her Dissertation
Faculty, students, friends and family gathered this past Wednesday to support former PhD candidate Sierra Casten and watched her present the remarkable work she has completed over the past five years. We would like to congratulate Dr. Sierra Casten on successfully defending her dissertation!
Before beginning her graduate school career, Dr. Casten participated in an internship at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center during the summer of 2020. There, she worked to collect archived light curves and spectra of the neutron star SAX J1808.4−3658 to analyze its weak X-ray bursts. She was admitted to MSU to begin grad school in the fall of 2020 but chose to defer a year to pursue her interest in Spanish culture and taught English as a foreign language in Spain. Dr. Casten then began graduate school in the fall of 2021.
Motivated by her NASA internship, she sought to understand the underlying physics behind these weak neutron star bursts under the advisement of Dr. Edward Brown and NASA collaborators, Dr. Tod Strohmayer and Dr. Peter Bult. Dr. Casten then did what most astronomers do not; she shifted from observational work to theoretical. She began developing models to understand the feasibility and possible stellar conditions required for theses weak bursts to be triggered by thermally unstable hydrogen ignition.
Her talent for presenting to an academic audience is exceptional, but even more impressive is her ability to effectively communicate across all ages and levels of learning. She has amassed a significant following on her TikTok page, where she teaches the public about a diverse range of astronomy-related topics. Her work as a scientific communicator earned her a brief feature in the Netflix Documentary on the James Webb Space Telescope, Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine. She has also received multiple awards recognizing her excellence in teaching introductory astronomy to undergraduates here at MSU. Beyond her skills as a communicator, she is a leader in creating opportunities for others to engage with the public, serving as an organizer for Astronomy on Tap (Lansing).
Dr. Casten has been a crucial part of the department. We are thrilled that she will be continuing her career at MSU as a postdoc working with Dr. Laura Chomiuk, and we look forward to the incredible work we know she will continue to do.
