I am a third-year graduate researcher and NSF Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Physics and Astronomy.

My current 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 World's Lab at UNC, where our main goal is to understand how planets evolve over time. My thesis project focuses on constraining planet occurance rates and calculating statistical comparisons of properties of planets at different ages. I released my first first-author paper in 2022 about the characterization of two planets in a 105 Myr stellar association, and recently published an article in Nature on a 3 Myr giant planet in the presence of the disk that formed it. 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: November 2024

Email: madysonb@live.unc.edu

Github: github.com/madysonb