Sebastian Gomez is the PI of the UTTEX group, where he studies exotic transients such as superluminous supernovae and tidal disruption events. He is an expert in machine learning methods and developed the tool FLEET to find interesting transients in large data streams from current and future surveys. Previously, he was a Clay Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics and a STScI Postdoctoral Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University in 2021 after completing a Physics degree at The University of Texas at El Paso, not far from his home town of Ciudad Juárez, México.
Dr. Megan Newsome is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the UTTEX group and studies transients around supermassive black holes, such as tidal disruption events (TDEs), and the galaxies in which they occur. She is a Primary Investigator of a “Key Project” with Las Cumbres Observatory, whose global network of telescopes allow us to find, classify, and monitor hundreds of these nuclear transients. Dr. Newsome obtained her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2024 and previously attended the University of Florida for her undergraduate studies in astrophysics.
Bella Longo is a graduate student at UT Austin studying the relationship between core-collapse supernovae and their host galaxy environments to inform future observations with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. She was a 2025 Summer Intern with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she developed models to automatically find and classify issues in near-infrared space telescope detectors. Bella obtained her B.S. in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder where she researched transformer-based deep learning methods to find stellar flares in light curve data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). She is an expert in machine learning methods in astrophysical applications.
Rebecca Wisenbaker is an undergraduate student at UT Austin researching the light curves of superluminous supernovae to predict their observability with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Maddie Gerard is an undergraduate student at UT Austin studying archival Hubble Space Telescope observations of SN 2016iet, a proposed pair-instability supernova, and the properties of its unique host galaxy.
Sofia Dunkerley is an undergraduate student at UT Austin studying the application of machine learning for classifying transients, specifically low-resolution supernovae, recorded by the Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy Imager (ETSI) instrument.
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