Kristen McQuinn

I am a 5th year graduate student at the Univserity of Minnesota working on my thesis reasearch in starbursting dwarf galaxies. In my current research with Evan Skillman, I study stellar populations in dwarf galaxies using images from the Hubble Space Telescope. The detailed information from these images allows me to reconstruct the star formation history of these galaxies using stellar evolution models in order to measure how long the starbrust phenomenon lasts. The star formation traced in the optical images can be linked the emission at other wavelengths as well. In particular, the UV emission coming from the both the clustered and diffuse areas of star formation can reveal much about timescales of emission and can facilitate a correlation between the rate of star formation at different wavelengths.