Today I had the pleasure of serving on the PhD committee for Nitya Mandyam Doddamane, who defended her thesis on the measurement of star-formation rates and stellar masses in spectroscopic surveys of galaxies. She compared different stellar populations models, based on different parts of the galaxy spectral energy distributions, and galaxy environments, to make inferences about which galaxies are and aren't forming stars. She has some nice examples that use environment to break some degeneracies in interpretation. In that sense, some of what she did was a causal inference. She also looked at aperture biases, comparing fiber spectroscopy to integral-field spectroscopy from various SDSS surveys. Her results are nice, and were beautifully presented, both in the talk and in the thesis. Congratulations Dr Mandyam!
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