It's been a while since my last post, and a lot has changed!
First, I'm married! To the wonderful Katie Felkins, who is featured in some of the earliest posts here. We had a great time celebrating with our friends and family at the Maryland Zoo. It's hard to believe that was 8 months ago.
Second, I left high energy physics and joined the quest for Earth-like planets around other stars! For me, this is the most exciting field of science right now (and it's the fastest growing field of astronomy, so I'm not alone in thinking this). Recent advances in technology have finally made this possible on a large scale (see e.g. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-062). My data comes from Project 1640, whose goal is to blot out as much of the light from the host star as possible so that we can see the faint planets nearby. Aaaand I now have a research website! www.pha.jhu.edu/~jaguilar
Last, I am going to try focusing on shorter, less content-heavy posts to try to lower the activation barrier for writing here. We'll see how that goes.
