Contact Directory
Jason E. Ybarra
DIRECTOR OF THE WVU PLANETARIUM & OBSERVATORY
Jason E. Ybarra is a Teaching Assistant Professor and serves as the Director of the WVU Planetarium & Observatory. Dr. Ybarra’s research interests include galactic star formation, protostellar outflows, physics education, and the history of astronomy. They earned a Ph.D. from the University of Florida where, as a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program (GSRP) fellow and a NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium fellow, they studied how star formation progresses through the Rosette Molecular Cloud by analyzing the stellar and gas content of embedded clusters. They also earned a M.S. in Physics from San Francisco State University, where as a graduate student, they co-discovered the first observational evidence of a precessing jet carving out a protostellar envelope. Dr. Ybarra's postdoctoral work at the Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM-Ensenada) involved characterizing mid-infrared emission from star-forming regions, studying protostellar outflow interactions, and developing astro-statistical methods. They also served as the editor of the "This Month in Astronomical History" column (2019-2020) for the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society (HAD-AAS), as well as being a frequent contributing author.
Dr. Ybarra enjoys teaching and mentoring students. Previous to WVU, they taught physics and astronomy at Davidson College, Bridgewater College, and California State University, Sacramento. They have also taught physics to monastics at the Drepung Loseling Monastery in Karnataka, India through the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. Dr. Ybarra also currently serves as a coordinator for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) Faculty and Student Team (FAST) program.
When not teaching or doing science, they write poetry, paint, camp in the woods, and spend time with their wife and cats.
Holly Legleiter
Coordinates strategic communications, public relations, digital, traditional and social media including earned, owned and paid media for the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology. Member of the NANOGrav Collaboration.
Susie Paine
Lead Graduate Assistant
Joseph Glaser
Scientific Computations Specialist
Graham Doskoch
Graduate Assistant
Graham is a fourth-year graduate student and new Graduate Assistant for the Planetarium, joining the team in January 2024. He loves the night sky and is excited to help others learn to navigate it. Graham's PhD work centers on pulsars, fast-spinning remnants of massive stars. A member of the NANOGrav and IPTA collaborations, he is part of an effort to make the first detection of low-frequency gravitational waves, using millisecond pulsars. Graham received his bachelor's degree in astrophysics and mathematics from Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia and his Master’s degree from WVU.
Jackson Taylor
Graduate Assistant
Jackson has just recently joined the WVU Planetarium in January and looks forward to sharing his love of astronomy with others. He previously served as a teaching assistant for the lab portion of Astronomy 106. His research interests are in pulsars, which are rapidly rotating stars, and the detection of gravitational waves, having joined the NANOGrav collaboration. Astronomers have recently used the predictability of pulsars to measure gravitational waves sloshing around our galaxy! His favorite planet is Jupiter because it's bigger than all other planets in our solar system combined. Jackson has Bachelor of Science degrees in Physics, Astronomy, and Math from Indiana University.