Benjamin Roulston has been appointed assistant professor of physics at Clarkson University.
He received his Ph.D. and master of arts degrees in astronomy from Boston University, and his bachelor of science degree in physics with honors from Clarkson University.
Roulston’s research interests involve interacting post-mass-transfer binary stars in short period orbits. He has extensively studied the dwarf carbon stars, which have excess carbon in their atmospheres, as probes of the formation process of short period binary systems. These short period binary stars are incredibly important to our ability to test the fundamental nature of the Universe. Many of these short period binary systems will be Galactic gravitational wave sources detectable with LISA in the future.
He has been published in several reputable academic journals, including The Astrophysical Journal and the Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices. He has given several contributed and invited talks and national and international conferences, and he is a member of the American Astronomical Society.
He previously served as a postdoctoral scholar research associate in astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. Before that, he was a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and a graduate research assistant at Boston University in the Department of Astronomy.
