Azul Ruiz Diaz

Azul started her MSc studies at Université de Montréal in September 2025 under the supervision of Jonathan Gagné. She is studying isolated planetary-mass objects (“planemos”) using MOCAdb, the Montreal Open Clusters and Associations database. Her project focuses on identifying and analyzing nearby candidates, with the goal of characterizing them further through future telescope observations.

She graduated from Barnard College in May 2025 with a BA in Astrophysics and a minor in English. During her undergraduate studies, she worked with the BDNYC (Brown Dwarfs in New York City) group at the American Museum of Natural History, where she analyzed the spectra of COCONUTS-2b, a cool exoplanet directly imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. She also completed a summer internship at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, where she worked on analyzing the James Webb Space Telescope spectra of the Super-Earth GJ 386 b.

Beyond research, she served on the executive board of BlueShift, the astronomy club of Columbia University, where she fostered student engagement with astronomy. She hopes to continue combining her passion for research with outreach to make astrophysics more accessible to wider audiences.