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Eric E. Mamajek

Submitted by munson on Wed, 2008-09-24 11:02. | |
Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Bausch & Lomb 420
(585) 275-5389

Prof. Mamajek joined the University of Rochester faculty in 2008 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He recieved his Ph.D. in Astronomy (2004) from the University of Arizona, his M.Sc. in Physics (1999) from the University of New South Wales/ADFA, and his B.S. in Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics (1998) from the Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College in his home state of Pennsylvania. In 1998, Eric was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. In 2004, Eric was awarded a 4-year Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics - the first recipient of the prestigious fellowship to come directly from graduate school.

Prof. Mamajek is an observational astrophysicist whose primary research interests are the formation and evolution of planetary systems, stars, and stellar groups in our Galactic neighborhood. He works mostly at infrared, visible and X-ray wavelengths, and uses both ground-based and satellite observatories. His recent and on-going research projects and collaborations involve quantifying and trying to understand the evolution of protoplanetary and dusty debris disks around normal stars, improving distance and age estimates to astrophysically interesting stellar, protostellar, substellar, and planetary systems, and surveys to image extrasolar planets and substellar companions to nearby stars in the near- and thermal infrared. He is perhaps best known for his discoveries of new nearby stellar clusters - too near the Earth to appear in images as dense concentrations of stars - and the novel kinematic cluster-finding, and age- and distance-estimation techniques he developed in the process. These were crucial contributions to the largest current study of the evolution of planet-building material around Sun-like stars, the Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems (FEPS) program on the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. Recently, he co-authored a theory study on the observational consequences of protoplanet collisions.
For further details, go to Prof. Mamajek's home page at: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/index.html

Mamajek, E.E., & Hillenbrand, L.A., in press, Astrophysical Journal, "Improved Age Estimation for Solar-Type Dwarfs Using Activity-Rotation Diagnostics"

Preibisch, Th., & Mamajek, E.E., in press, "The Nearest OB Association: Scorpius-Centaurus (Sco OB2)", Handbook of Star Forming Regions Vol. II. The Southern Sky, ed. B. Reipurth

Meyer, M.R, Carpenter, J.M., Mamajek, E.E., and 11 coauthors, 2008, Astrophysical Journal, 673, L181, "Evolution of Mid-Infrared Excess around Sun-like Stars: Constraints on Models of Terrestrial Planet Formation"

Mamajek, E.E., 2008, Astronomische Nachrichten, 329, 10, "On the Distance to the Ophiuchus Star-Forming Region"

Mamajek, E.E., & Meyer, M.R., 2007, Astrophysical Journal, 668, L175, "An Improbable Solution to the Underluminosity of 2M1207B: A Hot Protoplanet Collision Afterglow"