About Me
Originally from San Francisco, California, I moved to the Midwest for my undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, where I majored in Physics with a specialization in Astrophysics. I came back to the West Coast for my advanced studies at UCLA, in the department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences. Outside of planets, my interests include watching baseball (Go Giants!), cooking, and exploring cities via public transportation. I'm a frequent volunteer at Kuruvungna Springs, a native plants garden near UCLA run by the Tongva people. I am also an avid runner, and I ran the Chicago Marathon in 2016.
My last name is pronounced "MY-zner" (IPA: 'maɪznər). The first syllable rhymes with "pie". My pronouns are he/him/his.
Outreach
In addition to studying how planets and their atmospheres form and evolve, I am passionate about sharing my knowledge beyond the scientific community. As an undergraduate, I was President of the Ryerson Astronomical Society, the University of Chicago's undergrad-run astronomy club. In grad school, I have TA'ed EPS SCI 9, Solar System and Planets, in 2019, 2020, and 2021, winning an EPSS Teaching Award in 2020. Below you can find a list of public outreach events I've been a part of.
Outreach Activities
- Topics including "Super-Earths" and "Exoplanets" Super-Earths presentation video
- Various topics including “Planetary Atmospheres”, “Pluto”, “Life in the Solar System”, “The James Webb Space Telescope”, and “Planet Formation”, among others
- As President (2017-18), organized club activities, including trips for Dark Sky observing and to Yerkes Observatory, as well as public observing nights on campus.
Service Activities and Undergraduate Research Supervision
I have served as a peer reviewer for the Astrophysical Journal and Astrophysical Journal Letters. Between 2020 and 2022, I represented the graduate student body on the EPSS Curriculum Committee. In that time, we overhauled significant portions of the graduate student curriculum, and I provided input on the student perspective to the faculty on these changes. In 2021-2022, I was the research supervisor for UCLA undergraduate Manasa Lakshmi Narasimhan, working on super-Earth atmospheric evolution.