Astronomer at Wesleyan University
working on dusty disks
Hello! My name is Brianna Zawadzki, and I am an astronomer working on planet formation and circumstellar disks. Since earning my PhD from Penn State University in 2023, I have been working as a Brinson Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University.
Lately, I have been working on ALMA observations of protoplanetary (younger) and debris (older) disks, as well as developing techniques to better image such observations. See below for a few highlights!
The ALMA Survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) was a Cycle 9 ALMA Large Program that observed and characterized debris disks --- dusty analogues of the Solar System's Kuiper Belt. I led ARKS III, which focuses on characterizing the vertical structures of debris disks.
exoALMA is a Cycle 8 ALMA Large Program searching for young, still-forming planets embedded in their disks. I led exoALMA IX, which focuses on developing and applying alternative imaging techniques to enable the detection and characterization of the small-scale disk features at high confidence.
During my PhD, I contributed to Million Points of Light (MPoL), a Python package designed for interferomeric imaging. I used MPoL to develop a robust regularized maximum likelihood (RML) imaging and validation workflow for ALMA observations of protoplanetary disks. Read the paper here.
Please feel free to email me at bzawadzki (at) wesleyan (dot) edu