Malena Rice, PhD
Assistant Professor of Astronomy
Dr. Malena Rice is a planetary astrophysicist and Assistant Professor in the Yale University Department of Astronomy. Her research centers on the formation and evolution of planetary systems, spanning topics including exoplanets, stars, and the outer solar system. She is also a PI in the CycloAstro Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of geophysics and astrophysics. Dr. Rice received her B.A. degrees in Physics and Astrophysics at UC Berkeley in 2017 before completing her Ph.D. in Astronomy at Yale University, for which she was awarded the 2022 IAU PhD Prize. Prior to joining Yale’s faculty, she spent one year at the MIT Kavli Institute as a Heising-Simons 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Rice has held leadership roles in support of the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) missions, as well as NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG).
What do you do with Data Science?
I work with large datasets to examine and understand trends in planetary demographics, focusing on photometric and spectroscopic signals from stellar hosts. Some relevant projects in the past have involved stellar classification using generative models applied to large spectroscopic datasets (e.g. Rice & Brewer 2020: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020ApJ...898..119R/abstract). Ongoing work in my group includes (1) the application of deep learning to disentangle stellar activity and Earth's atmospheric imprints from the signals of small shifts in spectroscopic lines due to the perturbative influence of a planet — part of the ongoing search for small exoplanets around nearby stars and (2) the application of neural networks to search for slow-moving, faint distant solar system objects in large astronomical imaging datasets. I anticipate that my team’s use of data science techniques will continue to expand in the coming years with the advent of large-scale datasets from the Vera Rubin Observatory’s LSST survey, the NASA Roman space mission, and the ESA Gaia space mission.