Faculty/Staff Detail

Melissa A. Morris, Physics Department, gave an invited talk titled “Phyllosilicate Emission from Protoplanetary Disks. Is the Indirect Detection of Extrasolar Water Possible?” at Cornell University in early December. Also, she submitted a paper to The Astrophysical Journal Letters titled “New Insight into the Solar System’s Transition Disk Phase Provided by the Metal-rich Carbonaceous Chondrite Isheyevo.” Morris travelled to Salt Lake City, Utah, for three days in December for in-depth planetarium training, and to Arizona State University (ASU) from Jan. 8-10 to participate in an international conference that she helped organize. The conference was titled “AstroRecon 2015, Conference on Spacecraft Reconnaissance of Asteroid and Comet Interiors.” While at ASU, she met with fellow NASA grant collaborators and conducted experiments on meteoritic material, which will be reported in upcoming publications and future grant proposals. Most recently, Morris coauthored two posters presented at the 225th Astronomical Society Meeting held Jan. 4-8 in Seattle, Wash.