Astronomy on Tap

About 500 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age, the first galaxies began to form. She looks at these galaxies with large telescopes to constrain physical properties of the Universe during the Cosmic Dawn.
As a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Davis, Ms. Bolan is researching some of the first galaxies that formed, when the Universe was less than one billion years old. She writes and uses Python codes with statistical analysis to determine properties of these galaxies.

She is passionate about outreach and science communication; she runs a chapter of Astronomy on Tap in Davis, CA, where astronomers give public talks at a local brewery, as well as serve on the board of the Sacramento regional science communications group Capital Science Communicators.