Lauren Miller

Lauren Miller is a Staff Scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) team. She joined the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD, in 2020. As a member of the COS team, Lauren has held several leadership roles and she is responsible for maintaining the CalCOS data reduction pipeline and for creating new calibration reference files. She is also heavily involved in providing user support to researchers as the lead of the HST Help Desk. 

She earned her Master of Science in Astronomy from San Diego State University in Fall 2023, with a thesis titled "Modeling and Retrieval of Secondary Eclipse Spectra for Characterizing Cloudy or Hazy Exoplanet Atmospheres," under the guidance of Dr. Gael Roudier (NASA JPL), Dr. Mark Swain (NASA JPL), and Dr. Jerome Orosz (SDSU). She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Astrophysics from Lehigh University, which she completed in Spring 2018. Prior to STScI, she worked for three consecutive years at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Exoplanet Discovery Group as a part of the Summer Internship Program (JPL SIP). 

She is deeply passionate about understanding the origins, formation, and evolution of planetary systems and is interested in studying the interiors, surfaces, and atmospheres of exoplanets and solar system objects. She is experienced in transmission and secondary eclipse spectroscopy of Hot Jupiters using HST WFC3 data, as well as transit photometry. Currently, in addition to her functional tasks at STScI, she has been studying asymmetric morning and evening terminators on exoplanets with TESS with Dr. Nestor Espinoza (STScI).

Education:

MSc in Astronomy, San Diego State University
BSc in Astrophysics, Lehigh University

Research Topics: Interiors, surfaces, and atmospheres of exoplanets and solar system objects to understand the origin, formation, and evolution of planetary systems and their potential for habitability; observational searches for exoplanets using direct imaging, radial velocity, microlensing, and transit techniques; computational astrophysics

Professional Websites:

Professional Website

LinkedIn

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5490-0061