Breadcrumb
- Home
- People
People
Faculty

Pinned content, custom sorted.
Casey DeRoo
Title/Position
Assistant Professor
Research interests include X-ray astronomy; X-ray telescopes & instrumentation; optical design; machine learning for astronomy.
Graduate Students

Cole Armstrong
Title/Position
Graduate Research Assistant
Email

Kenny Buffo
Title/Position
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email
Buffo's work focuses on developing adjustable X-ray optics for future applications in X-ray astrophysics.

Gavin Frueh
Title/Position
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email

Philp Griffin
Title/Position
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email

Colin Packard
Title/Position
Graduate Research Assistant
Email
Colin Packard’s research interests center primarily around instrumentation and hardware development, photometry, and observational astronomy. He is currently working with Dr. Philip Kaaret, Dr. Casey DeRoo, and Dr. Jun Wang on both X-ray detection with CMOS sensors, and the development and testing of sensor hardware for an air or space based platform for use in measuring atmospheric pollutants via Earth observing-photometry.

Jacob Payne
Title/Position
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email
Jacob studies X-ray instrumentation with applications for high energy astronomy. Motivated by the NICER telescope launched in 2017 and the following SEXTANT demonstration, Jacob is primarily interested in the characterization of pulsar emission and optimization of X-ray telescopes for pulsar observation. This work currently involves fabrication of slumped glass mirror substrates, electron-beam deposition of metallic reflective coatings, and optical metrology. Other work involves phase-resolved spectral analysis.
Undergraduate Students

Carson Bantz
Title/Position
Academic Research Assistant
Email

Mallory Weber
Title/Position
Academic Research Assistant
Email
Weber is part of a research group examining the performance of commercial CMOS sensors for use in soft X-ray observations and their potential as low-cost alternatives to CCD sensors.
Postdoctoral Researchers
There are currently no results to display.
Former Members

Cecilia Fasano
Title/Position
Graduate Research Assistant
Cecilia Fasano was a graduate research assistant in the DeRoo research group from 2020 to 2025. Cecilia fabricates and measures X-ray/UV gratings for use in space-based astronomical instruments.

Jeff Leiberton
Title/Position
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Examining the X-ray spectra of supernova remnants in the Large Magellanic Clouds.

Kristie Nault, PhD
Title/Position
Graduate Research Assistant
Email
Kristie studies X-ray spectra of binary stellar systems. She worked in the DeRoo research group starting in Spring 2020 and received her PhD in Physics and Astronomy in 2025.

Jared Termini
Title/Position
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Email
Integral in setting and operating hardware in the DeRoo lab as well as conducting/analyzing interferometric measurements of gratings.

Samantha Watkins
Title/Position
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Watkins undergraduate research focused on machine learning to identify outliers in the Chandra Source Catalog v2.0.