Peter Plavchan

4th Year Graduate Student
UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy
BS in Physics, Caltech 2001
MS in Physics, UCLA Fall 2002
PhD Candidate, UCLA Spring 2004
2002-2004 UCLA Astronomy Department Webmaster

Office: Knudsen 3-145N
Phone: (310)825-3172
Fax: (310)206-2096
Email: plavchan@astro.ucla.edu


Press Release!
AAS Conference, San Diego, CA
9:20am, January 10th, 2005

The Case of the Missing Disks


News coverage:

UCLA Newsroom
EurekAlert!
PhysOrg
Universe Today
In another country! (look under January 17th, this link will expire)
Space Daily (this link will expire)
RedNOVA
News About Space
SpaceRef
Innovations Report
Starry Skies
Astrostart (foreign language)
Another country!

Illustration Credit: Peter Plavchan, 2005

Research Interests and Selected Publications (from new to old):

  • Press Release presented at the 205th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, CA, January 9th-13th, 2005. Presented on January 10th, 2005, Session #17, Poster #5. (January 2005)

  • Poster (PDF) presented at the 205th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, CA, January 9th-13th, 2005. Presented on January 10th, 2005, Session #17, Poster #5. (January 2005)

  • Poster (PDF) presented at the Spitzer Space Telescope: New Views of the Cosmos Conference in Pasadena, CA, November 9th-12th, 2004. (November 2004)

  • Poster (PDF) presented at the LSST Conference in Seattle, WA, September 20th-22nd, 2004. (September 2004)

  • Poster (PDF) presented at the Keck Science Meeting at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA, September 17th-18th, 2004. (September 2004)

  • Poster (PDF or Powerpoint) presented at Second Terrestrial Planet Finder/Darwin International Conference in San Diego, CA, July 26th-29th, 2004. (July 2004)

  • I have a thesis topic! I will be working with Dr. Mike Jura, and my topic is "Planetary Systems Around M Dwarfs". You can read my thesis proposal here (PDF) and see my advancement to candidacy exam presentation here (PDF). (May 2004)

  • Paper accepted for publication in ApJ. Local copy available here. (November 2003)

  • Presentation for the UCLA Astronomy Department's Journal Club on SIRTF proposal planning. (November 2003)

  • Presentation for my Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) graduate course at UCLA on the generation and collimation of AGN jets. (December 2002)

  • Paper in ApJ. If you have access to the ApJ publications online, you may also access the paper here. (August 2002)

  • Paper for my quantum mechanics graduate course at UCLA on the connections between Feynman's Checkerboard, Spin and the Dirac Equation. (June 2002)

  • Paper in ApJ. If you have access to the ApJ publications online, you may also access the paper here. I developed flexible IDL code (for the LWS images in this paper) that is available upon re quest. (April 2002)

  • SIRTF memo resulting from research for Dr. Werner, SIRTF Project Scientist. Available as a Postscript or Microsoft Word document. (Fall 2000)

  • Paper from a Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship working with Dr. Werner. Available as a Postscript or Microsoft Word document. (Summer 1999)

  • Conference Proceedings from the IAU Symposium #184, "The Central Regions of the Galaxy and Galaxies". Entitled "Confirmation of MIR Source Near SGR A*?". Based on a Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship working with Dr. Werner and Dr. Cotera. The IDL code I wrote for this research is still in use today for data reduction by users of MIRLIN's infrared camera. (Summer 1997)

  • You may search for all of my publications either at NASA ADS query web site or the arXiv.org query web site.


Teaching:

  • Fall 2004 NSC 180 Elementary Astronomy Professor, University of Judaism

  • Received Department TA Award for 2002-2003!

  • Fall 2002 Astro 3 handouts here.

  • Winter 2002 Astro 3 handouts here.

  • Fall 2001 Astro 3 handouts here.

Personal:

  • Personal web site here, with everything you've ever wanted to know about me (sort of), and pictures too.

page views since 1/9/2002. Last updated: 1/10/05