Facilitator & Presenters

• Dr. Martha Irene Saladino (Facilitator)

  Dr. Martha Irene Saladino is an Education & Outreach Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where she supports the outreach efforts of different NASA missions and projects, including the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and NASA’s Universe of Learning. Martha Irene obtained her Ph.D. in Astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where she developed numerical simulations of evolved Sun-like double stars. Outside of work, Martha Irene enjoys running, reading, and digital illustration.

• Dr. Roger Wesson

  Dr. Roger Wesson is a Research Associate at Cardiff University. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from University College London (UCL) in 2004. After briefly leaving academia to work in the civil service, he returned to astronomy and to UCL for his first postdoctoral position in 2006. From 2011 to 2016, he worked for the European Southern Observatory in Chile, before returning to the UK once more.

• Dr. Tea Temim

  Dr. Tea Temim is a Research Astronomer at Princeton University. She previously worked on JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument at the Space Telescope Science Institute from 2016 to 2021, and was a research scientist and JWST postdoctoral fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from 2010 to 2016. She was a postdoctoral researcher and a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian from 2007 to 2010, and obtained her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2009.

• Dr. Shazrene S. Mohamed

  Dr. Shazrene S. Mohamed is a computational astrophysicist whose research focuses on simulations of evolved stars. She investigates how stars exchange mass, energy and momentum with each other and their surroundings, and the implications of these interactions for a wide range of phenomena, from the physics of bow shocks, bipolar and spiral outflows to powering symbiotic and X-ray binaries, nova and supernova explosions. A Rhodes Scholar, Shazrene holds a DPhil in astrophysics from the University of Oxford and an A.B. in astrophysics and mathematics from Harvard University. She spent two years as an Argelander Research Fellow at the University of Bonn in Germany before moving to Cape Town in South Africa where she held a joint position as an astronomer and associate professor at the South African Astronomical Observatory and the University of Cape Town. She recently moved to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville where she is an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy.