Jacqueline Antwi-Danso


Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the university of Toronto

About

Welcome to my page! I am a Banting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in Josh Speagle and Gwen Eadie's Astrostatistics research group. I also have a joint affiliation at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I completed my PhD at Texas A&M University, where I worked with Casey Papovich on searching for the most massive galaxies in the distant Universe. Prior to my PhD, I was a Clark Scholar at Texas Christian University and an intern at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where I worked with Kat Barger and Andrew Fox on the distances and chemical abundances of the Magellanic Stream's Leading Arm, respectively.I was born and raised in the beautiful West African country of Ghana. Beyond academia, I've been involved with organizing outreach events and programs including TEDxTCU, TAMU Physics Festival, Astronomy on Tap, Bryan, and more recently, LUMA. Additionally, I strive to give back to my community through mentoring via platforms such as GLASS, CUWiP and Project iSWEST.

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered extremely faint massive quiescent galaxies at increasingly higher redshifts. They are up to three times more massive than the Milky Way and are purported to have formed “impossibly early,” within a billion years of the Big Bang. To achieve these large masses at such early epochs, they must form stars extremely rapidly, at rates that are uncomfortably close to the limits allowed by galaxy formation physics.My current research involves using medium-band surveys and newer selection methods to 1) increase the detection rate of massive quiescent galaxies at z > 3 and 2) improve their sample purity in large photometric surveys. I am also the PI of a JWST Cycle 2 program designed to obtain some of the first chemical abundance measurements of massive quiescent galaxies at z ~ 4. Our goal is to compare the formation timescales inferred from their abundances to those obtained from modeling their star formation histories to ultimately build a picture of how quiescent galaxies assembled over the past 13 billion years.


The feniks survey

When did the first quiescent galaxies appear? How did the most massive galaxies in the early Universe form? These are the questions we hope to answer with the Flamingos-2 Extragalactic Near-IR K-split Survey.  The survey employs novel medium band K filters to reduce contamination from low redshift interlopers and increase our photometric redshift accuracy by factors of 4 and 7, respectively. Learn more at feniks.tamu.edu.


color selection of galaxies in the jwst era

Despite its utility in separating star-forming and quiescent galaxies in large photometric datasets, the UVJ diagram is fraught with problems at z > 3. We introduce an alternative: the synthetic ugi diagram, which mitigates these limitations by 1) reducing the contamination in quiescent samples from 65% to 30% at z = 5, and 2) eliminating the need for extrapolation to determine rest-frame colors.


The magellanic system

The Magellanic Stream and its Leading Arm are the largest and most massive gaseous structures in the Galactic halo. As such, they provide useful constraints for dynamical models of the Magellanic Clouds and an opportunity to study gas inflows around the Milky Way in detail. Using H𝜶 detections from WHAM and spectra from HST/COS, we determined the distance and chemical abundance of the Leading Arm.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Full CV available upon request.


EDUCATION

2017 - 2023

  • Ph.D. & MSc. in Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
    Dissertation : Optimized Survey Strategies and Selection Methods for Massive Galaxies at z > 3
    Supervisor: Casey Papovich

2013 - 2017

  • BSc. in Astronomy & Physics, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX
    Supervisor: Kathleen Barger

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

  • 2023-present: Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto

  • 2023-present: Visiting Postdoctoral Associate, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

  • 2016: Space Astronomy Summer Program Intern, Space Telescope Science Institute

  • 2015: Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Intern, Texas Christian University

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PUBLICATION SUMMARY (2020-2024)

I am an author/co-author on 11 peer-reviewed publications with a total of 234 citations and an h-index of 9.

  • First-author: 3 (49 citations)

  • Second-author: 1 (26 citations)

  • Co-author: 7 (159 citations)

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ACADEMIC AWARDS

2023 - 2025
2023
2019
2019
2017
2016
2016
2016
2015
2015 - 2017
2013 - 2017
2013 - 2016

CAD 70,000/yr - NSERC Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship
$650 - Texas A&M University Chia-Lai Wang Travel Scholarship
$1000 - American Astronomical Society FAMOUS Grant
$800 - Texas A&M Office of Graduate and Professional Studies Travel Grant
Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Medal, AAS 229
$6000 - TCU Horned Frog Grant
$5000 - TCU Clark Society Endowed Scholarship
$619 - NRAO Travel Grant
$1500 - TCU Science and Engineering Research Center Grant
$1000/yr - TCU Joseph Morgan Physics Award
$26,230/yr - TCU International Student Grant
$11,000/yr - TCU Faculty Scholarship

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OBSERVING PROGRAM SUMMARY

1 Principal Investigator and 5 co-I programs totaling 200+ hours

  • 2023: JWST/NIRSpec MSA - Cycle 2 GO 4318, 11.2 hours, PI - $166, 000 (NASA), CAD $100,000 (CSA)

  • 2023: ALMA (Cycle 10, 14.4 hours, co-I)

  • 2021: JWST/NIRCam+NIRSpec Fixed Slit (Cycle 1 GO 2362, 8.6 hours, co-I)

  • 2021: Keck/MOSFIRE (2022A semester, 12 hours, co-I)

  • 2019: Gemini/Flamingos-2 (Large & Long Program, 170 hours, co-I)

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COLLABORATIONS

CANUCS

CANUCS

CEERS

CEERS

COSMOS-Web

COSMOS-WEB

COSMIC SPRING

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PRESENTATION SUMMARY

  • Invited colloquia and seminars: 6
    Princeton University, Saint Mary's University, Herzberg Astronomy & Astrophysics, Univ. of Pittsburgh, UMass Amherst, CASCA 2024

  • Lunch talks: 3
    STScI, Univ. Washington Seattle

  • Contributed talks: 17

  • Outreach talks: 13

  • Conference posters: 10

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

Science

Keck Science Meeting 2023, Berkeley, CA, USA

Outreach

IAU GA 2024, Cape Town, SA

IN THE PRESS

Last updated September 2024

Contact

Thanks for visiting my website and taking an interest in my work.
I'd love to connect with you.

[email protected]
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
50 St George St, Toronto ON
M5S 3H4, Canada