Carl Rodriguez is an assistant professor of physics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, a position he has had since spring 2023.  He completed his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2016, working with Prof. Fred Rasio, before moving on to be a Pappalardo Fellow at MIT (2016-2019), an ITC Fellow at Harvard (2019-2020), and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2020-2022).  He is PI of the stellar dynamics and gravitational waves group at UNC, currently supported by active grants from the National Science Foundation (AST-2009916), the Kaufman Foundation (New Investigator Award), NASA’s Astrophysics Theory Program (21-ATP21-0144), and is a recipient of a 2022 Sloan Fellowship, a 2022 Packard Fellowship, and the 2023 Vera Rubin Early Career Prize from the American Astronomical Society.  Carl is originally from Shreveport, Louisiana.

Ugo Di Carlo is a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, working in the field of star clusters dynamics and N-body simulations. He obtained his PhD at Università degli studi dell’Insubria in 2021. During his PhD he studied the formation of gravitational wave sources and the formation of massive black holes in young star clusters. Besides science, he loves cooking, music, photography and video games.

Kuldeep Sharma is a graduate student in the Physics department at CMU since 2018. He previously worked under the supervision of Professor Sergey Koposov on mass estimation of Large Magellanic Cloud using the proper motion data of Blue Horizontal Branch stars from Gaia. Kuldeep is currently working on the time evolution of star cluster density profiles under the supervision of Professor Carl Rodriguez using COSMIC and the Cluster Monte Carlo (CMC) code.

Tomás Cabrera is a third-year graduate student in physics at Carnegie Mellon University working under Asst. Prof. Carl Rodriguez using computational methods to study compact object dynamics in stellar clusters.  He moved to Pittsburgh after earning his BS in Physics at MIT from 2015-2019, during which he participated in the 2018 REU program at Northern Arizona University, working with Dr. Joe Llama of Lowell Observatory on detecting molecular signatures in exoplanet spectra.  Tomás grew up in Broomfield, Colorado.

Gina Chen is a second-year grad student at CMU working with Carl Rodriguez and Tiziana Di Matteo. She grew up in Austin, TX and went to the University of Texas at Austin, where she worked on star formation research. Outside of school, she loves rock climbing, digital art, and writing letters to her friends.