I had the great honor to be on the PhD committee of Lily Zhao (Yale), who defended her dissertation today. It was great and remarkable. She has worked on hardware, calibration, software, stellar astrophysics, and planets. Her seminar was wide-ranging, and the number and scope of the questions she fielded was legion. She has already had a big impact on extreme precision radial-velocity projects, and she is poised to have even more impact in the future. One of the underlying ideas of her work is that EPRV projects are integrated hardware–software systems. This idea should inform everything we do, going forward. I asked a million technical questions, but I also asked questions about the search for life, and the astronomical community's management and interoperation of its large supply of diverse spectrographs. In typical Zhao fashion, she had interesting things to say about all these things.
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