Charlie Tolley

About Me

Education: UC Berkeley, Astrophysics, Bachelor of Arts, Class of 2025. Regent's and Chancellor's Scholarship

Research Interests: Instrumentation in Radio, Optical, and Infrared Astronomy.

Me: I'm an avid gardener, woodworker, and baker, and I'm deeply involved in school organizations like the Ballet Company at Berkeley, and I work at LBNL as a student assistant and with the Python DeCal staff as the head instructor. I also have a pet rat named SmartDog in my apartment and three cats that live at home!

Research

Current Research - Optical/Infrared

I am working with Dr. David Schlegel at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab on optical wavelength spectra from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). These spectra came from the secondary target program, which has a great potential for catching novel objects and objects that were missed by DESI's targeting software, both of which have interesting scientific implications. The proposal paper is here.

I have also been working on a Visual Inspection Campaign, looking for Lyman Alpha Emitters in Subaru and ODIN targets. This project will inform the direction of future DESI directions, and has allowed me to develop a practical instinct for identifying common astronomical objects in the optical bands at many redshifts.

Current Research - Observing

For many nights, I ran the Blanco 4-meter Telescope up at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, both in person and remote. I also ran the .9-meter telescope at the same site alongside Georgia State grad students Aman Kar and Sebastian Carrazco.

Current Research - Radio Instrumentation

I work with Prof. Aaron Parsons and graduate student Christian Bye on antennae looking for the 21-cm line from the Epoch of Reionization. I have worked on impedance-matching circuits, dipole antenna engineering and S-parameter calibration with a FieldFox VNA.

Past Projects

ASTRON 161 Final Project: Using the Schwarzchild metric, I developed a system of equations to describe a small object falling into a black hole, and then ran a simulation that solved these systems of differential equations to animate the movement of this small object. Here is the project writeup

Python DeCal: I and three other people wrote an animation that showed the path of an arbitrary solar system with respect to one of the planet's in the system. We used ordinary differential equations to plot the paths, astropy to give us initial conditions, and we presented our work to the class of 40.

Community

Teaching Experience: I have taught the Python DeCal (student run course) at UC Berkeley for the past two years. We serve a niche of students who did not come in to Cal with the necessary coding skills for the astronomy field and work with them and faculty to get the students to a place where they can enter the astronomy labs confidently. While it is not purely for astronomy students, we are sponsored by the Astronomy Department and so try to tailor our curriculum with that in mind. We were able to work with the faculty to make the curriculum even more targeted and to make a coding project test that will help gauge how adept students are at the type of coding they will need to succeed. This will allow them to tailor the coding classes they take over their undergraduate years.

Volunteer Experience: I am volunteering as a co-Climate Advisor for the Astronomy Department here at UC Berkeley. I am a mandated reporter, and my job is to help faculty understand what the students need, and to help foster a creative and accepting environment for students to learn and grow. In high school, I worked with my hometown libraries to run a program that allowed young children to view the sky through several sizes of telescope, including an 8" diameter telescope I have been learning to operate over the course of the past three years (there's always something new to be learned!)

I also was an executive leader of my high school's chapter of Society of Women Engineers wherein I started a series of talks that highlighted women in STEM. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts from speakers and the COVID-19 crisis, the talks could not continue in the manner I had envisioned. I did learn a lot!

Contact

Email: School: tolley412@berkeley.edu Work: charlieglenn.t@gmail.com

Phone: (530) 309-5588

Elements

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    i++;
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