Hello! My name is Ray Garner and I am a postdoc in the Astronomy Group at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. I am working with Dr. Rob Kennicutt on the Star formation, Ionized Gas, and Nebular Abundances Legacy Survey (SIGNALS), a survey of HII regions across ~35 galaxies. You can check out the survey paper here.

Before I arrived in College Station, I was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio working with Prof. Chris Mihos on a detailed analysis of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) and its small satellite group using the deep, wide-field, narrowband imaging capabilities of the Burrell Schmidt 24/36-inch telescope.

Briefly, my thesis utilizes narrowband images of Hα, Hβ, [OIII]λλ4959,5007, and [OII]λλ3726,3729. These images allowed me to search the entire M101 Group for outlying, intragroup star-forming regions (finding none), measure the oxygen abundance gradient of M101 (suggesting a broken gradient at $R_{25}$), and constrain stellar ages throughout the entire disk (finding a very dynamic spiral pattern). You can read more about that research below, or click here.

Before attending CWRU, I was a student at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina where I graduated with a B.S. in Physics, Summa Cum Laude. While there, I completed research in general relativity with Dr. Bill Baker (ret.). During the summer of 2017, I attended a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. There, I worked on ionized gas kinematics of nearby, low-mass galaxies with the late Dr. Liese van Zee.