Madyson Barber
[she/her/hers]
Graduate Student
UNC-Chapel Hill
...
I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Physics and Astronomy.
My research revolves around the discovery of young (≲ 1000 Myr) exoplanets using TESS data and characterizing the planet, host star, and host star's association. I work with Dr. Andrew Mann and the Young Worlds Lab at UNC, where our main goal is to understand how planets evolve over time. I published my first first-author paper in 2022 on the characterization of two planets in a 105 Myr stellar association in the Kepler prime field, and for my Master's thesis project, we developed a method for aging stellar clusters based on Gaia magnitude uncertainties. I am currently focused on understanding planets younger than ~50 Myr, including a discovery published in Nature on a 3 Myr giant planet in the presence of the disk that formed it, with a broader goal of probing which planet formation pathway dominates in recreating the distribution of mature planets discovered by Kepler. You can read more about my research here.
I was an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for COMP110 for three years. I worked with ~40 other undergrads to serve over 600 introductory computer science students each semester. I provided 5-6 one-on-one office hours and 2 hours of group tutoring per week, in addition to helping answer questions during lecture, developing course material, and being the primary point-of-contact for ~20 students.
Since graduating undergrad, I have worked closely with the Chancellor's Science Scholars. I mentor a number of students, and using my TA experience, I was able to develop and teach a weekly 90-minute introductory computer science workshop for the Chancellor's Science Scholars Summer EXCELerator program in 2022 and 2023. While I was not able to teach the workshop in 2024 (you can read about why here!), I helped develop the next itteration of the workshop for the new cohort of students.
Last Updated: August 2025
