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We have designed an inquiry-based laboratory activity on transiting extrasolar planets for an introductory college-level astronomy class. The activity was designed with the intent of simultaneously teaching science process skills and…
Many topics in introductory astronomy at the college or high-school level rely implicitly on using astronomical photographs and visual data in class. However, students bring many preconceptions to their understanding of these materials that…
Research in astronomy education has uncovered that many learners possess limited and fragmented understanding of stars. The corresponding misconceptions manifest in various areas such as star formation, size, the relationship between stars…
Recent advances in our understanding of the Universe have revolutionized our view of its structure, composition and evolution. However, these new ideas have not necessarily been used to improve the teaching of introductory astronomy…
The Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy have been designed to help introductory astronomy instructors actively engage their students in developing their conceptual understandings and reasoning abilities across a wide range of…
In these lectures I review observations of star-forming molecular clouds in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies to develop a physical intuition for understanding star formation in the local and high-redshift Universe. A lot of this material is…
Popular accounts of exciting discoveries often draw students to physics and astronomy, but at the introductory level it is challenging to connect with these in a meaningful way. The use of real astronomical data in the classroom can help…
Open and globular star clusters have served as benchmarks for the study of stellar evolution due to their supposed nature as simple stellar populations of the same age and metallicity. After a brief review of some of the pioneering work…
This is a summary of my lectures during the 2011 IAC Winter School in Puerto de la Cruz. I give an introduction to the field of stellar populations in galaxies, and highlight some new results. Since the title of the Winter School was {\it…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
Pre-main sequence evolutionary theory is not well-calibrated to observations. With care, the observed quantities can be converted into effective temperature and luminosity (i.e. the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram) which the theoretical…
Since the early 1970s, stellar population modelling has been one of the basic tools for understanding the physics of unresolved systems from observation of their integrated light. Models allow us to relate the integrated spectra (or…
The stellar populations of galaxies contain a wealth of detailed information. From the youngest, most massive stars, to almost invisible remnants, the history of star formation is encoded in the stars that make up a galaxy. Extracting some,…
The physics of stars, their workings and their evolution, is a goldmine of problems in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. We discuss many examples that illustrate the possibility of deepening student's knowledge of statistical…
In systems undergoing starbursts the evolution of the young stellar population is expected to drive changes in the emission line properties. This evolution is usually studied theoretically, with a combination of evolutionary synthesis…
In this manuscript I summarise the work I have carried out in the last 10 years. My research projects are articulated around various fields in astrophysics having, as unifying theme, the 3D modelling and the observation of stellar…
Stellar models provide a vital basis for many aspects of astronomy and astrophysics. Recent advances in observational astronomy -- through asteroseismology, precision photometry, high-resolution spectroscopy, and large-scale surveys -- are…
Decades of research show that students learn more in classes that utilize active learning than they do in traditional, lecture-only classes. Active learning also reduces the achievement gaps that are often present between various…
The detection and study of extrasolar planets is an exciting and thriving field in modern astrophysics, and an increasingly popular topic in introductory astronomy courses. One detection method relies on searching for stars whose light has…
The determination of chemical composition is crucial for investigating the formation and evolution of star forming galaxies and provides a powerful tool to constrain the effects of galactic winds and accretion from the cosmic web. In this…