Zoie Telkamp

I’m an astronomy PhD candidate and Jefferson Fellow at the University of Virginia, where I study star formation using multiwavelength observations from facilities including ALMA, JWST, Herschel, Spitzer, and SOFIA. My research spans a range of physical scales, from the broader star-forming cores and natal environments down to the innermost disk-forming regions around protostars.

Alongside my research, I’m interested in developing software tools and resources for astronomical research. I helped develop sedcreator, a Python package for spectral energy distribution building and fitting, and led its second major release. As part of a seed funding project for the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins, I’m also developing a benchmarking framework to test whether large language models can be trusted to help astronomers access and use data across different archives and wavelength regimes.

Before graduate school, I earned my B.A. in Astrophysics from UC Berkeley, where I studied protoplanetary disks using machine learning methods.

Outside of astronomy, I love photography, glassblowing, and reading.