By the end of their second year, students must complete one quarter of independent study with a faculty member and give a department talk on that work. Listed below are descriptions of some of the available projects.

Fall 2009

• "Analysis of the the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect exhibited by parent stars of
  transiting extrasolar planets"   Greg Laughlin
• "Globular Clusters, Dark Matter, and Galaxy Formation." Jean Brodie
• "Searching for extended Lya emission from High z galaxies and AGN." Jason X. Prochaska
• "Exploring the metallicity and extinction curve of high redshift galaxies." Jason X. Prochaska
• "Identifying galaxies in the foreground of high z Gamma-Ray Bursts." Jason X. Prochaska
• "The Star-Formation History of Galaxies." Sandy Faber
• "What is different about LINER Galaxies." Sandy Faber
• "Final redshifts for "Sngls" in the DEEP2 database." Sandy Faber
• "Detailed chemical abundances of Galactic globular cluster stars using
  Keck/DEIMOS spectra and a newly-developed analysis method." Graeme Smith & Raja Guha Thakurta
• "Understanding Chemical Mixing in the Birth of Star Clusters." Mark Krumholz
• "Infrared Emission from Dust in Elliptical Galaxies." Bill Mathews (note: student funding t.b.d., please verify)

Fall 2008

• "Searching for extended Lya emission from High z galaxies and AGN." Jason X. Prochaska
• "Exploring the metallicity and extinction curve of high redshift galaxies." Jason X. Prochaska
• "Identifying galaxies in the foreground of high z Gamma-Ray Bursts." Jason X. Prochaska
• "Detecting the Secondary Eclipse of Hot Jupiter Planet HD 189733b in L' Band from the IRTF." Jonathan Fortney
• "Thermal emission light curves of solar system terrestrial planets, as viewed by a distant observer." Jonathan Fortney
• "Modeling Thermal Emission and Reflected Light from the Close-In Hot Jupiter Planets." Jonathan Fortney
• "Characterizing the Transient Universe." Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz
• "Infrared Emission from Dust in Elliptical Galaxies." Bill Mathews
• "Globular Clusters, Dark Matter, and Galaxy Formation." Jean Brodie
• "Environments of red-sequence galaxies of different morphological types in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey." Sandra Faber
• "Simulating Star Formation in Space and Time." Mark Krumholz