Melissa Ness

Melissa Ness

Research Interests

I use stars as tools to understand the Milky Way's formation. I am particularly interested in understanding the relationship between the ages, chemical abundances and orbital properties of stars, across the Milky Way disk and bulge. I am working with a number of datasets to examine our Galaxy, including GALAH, APOGEE, Kepler and Gaia.

I am also very interested in developing sensible and efficient methodologies to extract information from data and to interpret this (high dimensional) information. We are now in a regime in astronomy where the huge volumes of spectroscopic, photometric and time-domain data call for new and cross-disciplinary analysis approaches. This affords a tremendous opportunity for exploration and creativity.

Grad Students

Adam J. Wheeler