Leslie Moranta

Leslie is a student who graduated from the B.Sc. in Physics and Computer Science at Université de Montréal in the winter of 2022. Passionate about astrophysics from a young age, she has been working at iREx and the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium for two years under the supervision of Jonathan Gagné.

During her summer internships, Leslie developed an algorithm to find new young stars associations in the vicinity of the Sun thanks to the data of the Gaia mission. These associations host stars where we can go look for exoplanets and planemos.

Leslie now pursues a PhD with the aim to further characterize these associations. She has been working since May 2022 in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History to do the gyrochronological study of new associations, a method used to estimate their age by studying the period of rotation of stars.