Christina Willecke Lindberg

Astrophysics Graduate Student
at Johns Hopkins University

I am a fifth-year astronomy Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University working with the ISM* Group at STScI, interested in understanding how we can use observations of stars to measure the interstellar medium (ISM). In particular, my thesis research focuses on constraining the 3D stucture of the ISM in nearby galaxies like Magellanic Clouds (Scylla) and Andromeda (PHAT) using resolved stellar populations.

In addition to research, I am also involved in various graduate leadership positions, organizing department graduate initiatives as former president of the Physics and Astronomy Graduate Students (PAGS) organization and JHU representative for the Astronomy Graduate Congress.

Research Projects

Over the years, I have worked on a variety of astronomy projects, ranging from asteroids to the circumgalactic medium. Check out my presentation abstracts and publications on ADS or my projects on Github.

Massive Stars and the ISM in M31

To understand the interplay of energy and momentum between massive stars and the ISM, we have to know where massive stars are located. We used photometry from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT), characterized by the Bayesian Extinction and Stellar Tool (BEAST) to look for main-sequence massive star candidates across 1/3 of the disk of M31. In doing so, we managed to produce a catalog of +40,000 candidate stars with stellar and line-of-sight extinction fits, which can be downloaded here. We found that massive stars have, on average, the same amount of extinction regarless of their environment, indicating that dust around massive stars is agnostic to galactic environment. Read the paper here!

Scylla: Parallel Imaging of the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds

Since arriving at JHU, I have been working with Claire Murray (PI), Josh Peek , and Karl Gordon from STScI on Scylla, a photometric imaging survey studying the stellar distribution and dust properties of nearby low-metallicity environments like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC). Over these past several years, we have acquired 500 orbits of multi-band photometric measurements with Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. We use the Bayesian Extinction and Stellar Tool (BEAST) to fit stellar models and dust extinction to every star observed in each field, allowing us to constrain the dynamics and structure of the ISM in the Magellanic Clouds.

AsteroGaP: Modeling Sparse Asteroid Lightcurves with Gaussian Processes

While at the University of Washington, I worked with Dr. Daniela Huppenkothen at the DIRAC Institute, leading the development of a new statistical method for inferring the rotational period of asteroids called AsteroGaP (Asteroid Gaussian Processes). Through a combination of Bayesian statistics, MCMC, and Gaussian Processes, we were able to develop a new method to accurately characterize asteroid light curve profiles from sparse photometric measurements. Check out the paper!

Werk SQuAD

During my undergraduate at the University of Washington, I was a member of Prof. Jessica Werk's Student Quasar Absorption Diagnosticians (SQuAD), researching the CGM2 survey, which seeks to constrain the cosmic baryon cycle of nearby galaxies. As a Werk SQuAD member, I classified thousands of absorption features from dozens of quasars observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Cosmic Origin Spectrograph.

Presentations

Below is a selection of the talks and posters I have presented at conferences, workshops, seminars, etc. The full PDF for each presentation can be accessed by clicking on the corresponding image.

About Me

I'm originally from Copenhagen, Denmark, but grew up in Germany and the United States. In my free time, I like to pursue more artistic (aka less computer-screen depedent) hobbies. I’ve recently started learning cello and, for the past few years, I've been singing soprano in JHU ECCO and Choral Society. In the meantime, I’m probably taking lots of pictues of my cat, Oliver.