Mackenna L. Wood
Hello!
Dr. Mackenna Wood is the Director of the Saunders Planetarium at MOSI in Tampa, FL and an observational astronomy researcher. She is passionate about sharing the wonder of astronomy with everyone and creating shows resources to do so. She studies young stars and planets, observing them in multiple wavelengths to better understand how they form and change over time.
Prior to MOSI Mackenna was a post-doctoral associate at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT, working with Dr. Hans Mortiz Gunther on a project analyzing ten years of multi-wavelength data on two young stars, SU Aur and AB Aur.Mackenna did her graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the Young Worlds lab under Dr. Andrew Mann. For her Master’s research, she developed the MOLUSC (Multi-Observational Limits on Unseen Stellar Companions) code for placing observational limits on stellar binarity. Mackenna’s doctoral thesis was “Lithium Depletion Boundary Ages of Newly-Discovered or Poorly-Studied Young, Planet Hosting Associations”.
