Dr. Ilsa Cooke
Nyx is an undergraduate researcher joining us this summer, who has been awarded an Undergraduate Student Research Award by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Nyx will be working on a research project using satellite data to probe the chemistry in forest fire smoke. Specifically, they will be modeling the dispersion and evolution of glyoxal and formaldehyde in BC wildfire plumes. Congratulations and welcome to Nyx!
Arieh has been awarded an Undergraduate Student Research Award by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for this summer. They will be continuing their work on building a new system at TRIUMF to investigate sulfur reservoirs in the interstellar medium. Congratulations Arieh!
Matteo is a visiting Physics PhD student from the University of Trento in Italy. He mainly focuses on studying gas-phase ion-molecule reaction processes involving beyond-the-second-row elements in the interstellar medium such as silicon, sulfur, and phosphorus. Starting in April, he will be working with our group and the Momose group to further investigate sulfur chemistry in the ISM. Welcome Matteo!
The UBC Astrochem Lab attended the American Chemical Society Spring 2025 Meeting in San Diego this March. Ilsa co-organized A Symposium to Honor Eric Herbst’s Contributions to Our Understanding of the Molecular Universe, facilitating discussions of exciting current and future directions in astrochemistry with researchers from across the globe. Carina, Elsa, Reace, and Tom additionally presented their research at the PHYS Poster Session. Congrats to all for a successful and insightful meeting!
Reace recently took a trip to the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to attend an Observer Training Workshop. He is now a certified remote observer for the Green Bank Telescope, used in the GOTHAM collaboration. Happy molecule hunting!
GOTHAM has recently detected all three isomers of cyanopyrene in the Taurus molecular cloud (TMC-1) using data collected with the 100-m Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Cyanopyrene is currently the largest molecule ever identified by radio astronomy in the ISM.
Read more about the detection of 1-cyanopyrene in Science, and 2- and 4-cyanopyrene in Nature Astronomy. Press releases and media highlights can also be found on our Publications page.
Congratulations to Carina and Reace for passing their comprehensive exams and officially being admitted to candidacy! Photo evidence of studying hard in the wild is attached.
Sam will be rejoining the group as a PhD student in the fall, joint supervised by Dr. Takamasa Momose and Dr. Ilsa Cooke. Sam will be studying astrochemically relevant molecules in para-hydrogen matrices. Welcome back Sam!
Congratulations to Carina for winning the 1st place poster award at the RTG-DynCAM Convention this year!
DynCAM is a collaboration between research groups at the University of Freiburg and at UBC. The goal of the collaboration is to investigate and control the electron and nuclear dynamics of systems prepared in well-defined quantum states, particularly at cold temperatures and on ultrashort timescales, through complementary experimental and theoretical projects.
Carina attended the 3rd annual convention in Freiburg, Germany this July/August and presented her poster, Studying the behaviour of OH radicals on interstellar ice surfaces.
Our recent paper, On the Origin of Infrared Bands Attributed to Tryptophan in Spitzer Observations of IC 348, has been highlighted by the American Astronomical Society. We assess the recent detection of tryptophan in the IC 348 star cluster using new laboratory experiments and JWST spectral data. Read more about the findings here!