My name is Maša (Masha) Kilibarda and I am an undergraduate student at Haverford College near Philadelphia, set to graduate in May 2026. Originally from the small Eastern European country of Montenegro, I moved to the United States to pursue a degree in Astronomy and Physics with a concentration in Scientific Computing.

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My research work focuses on internal properties of spiral galaxies in the nearby Universe. Specifically, I am interested in how gas in galaxy disks behaves and evolves over time, as well as ways in which we can combine observations and theory to understand gas phenomena. I am an active member of both Professor Allsion Strom's group at CIERA - Northwestern University, and Professor Karen Masters' galaxies group at Haverford College. I have experience working with large data samples (thousands of individual galaxies), as well as developing computational methods to effectively analyze such samples. I also closely studied properties of individual galaxies, namely chemical abundances of nearby star-forming HII regions. My observational work is mainly based on data collected using IFU (integral field unit) specially resolved spectroscopy, meaning I work with 3D data cubes where each pixel in a 2D image has a corresponding spectrum. Additionally, I have experience working with data from the Green Bank Radio Telescope (GBT). After obtaining my undergraduate degree, I hope to further my study of galaxies near and far through a graduate degree in Astronomy.

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Outside the classroom, I spend much of my time teaching and participating in initiatives to advance diversity in Physics and Astronomy. At Haverford, I work as an undergraduate teaching assistant for introductory Physics and Astronomy classes, as well as a peer tutor for Astronomy, Physics, and Math. Teaching is an incredibly rewarding and important part of my life. During my first year of college, I had the pleasure of receiving assistance from many wonderful professors and upperclassmen peers. This inspired me to give back to my community and to invest much of my time into supporting students in excelling academically.

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As a low-income international student in the U.S. and a young woman in science, I am all too familiar with the many challenges underprivileged students face in navigating academia. For this reason, I strive to provide students with additional support in accessing available resources and integrating into the Physics community. In the future, I hope to work on developing more institutional mechanisms to assist underrepresented students. I wish to dedicate my career to assisting young enthusiastic people interested in the sciences, training them to be better researchers and to break the boundaries they were assigned at birth. In addition to working with students directly, I often collaborate with professors and administration offices on campus to work on addressing accessibility issues in science careers.

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My non-academic work includes being one of the leaders of the Underrepresented Genders in Physics and Astronomy student group at Haverford College. We work on organizing monthly events with a focus on promoting gender diversity in Physics and Astronomy, fostering a more tolerant department culture, and providing a safe space for gender minorities. We are especially proud to have hosted several successful colloquiums, where we invited visiting gender minority speakers to share their career stories. These events would usually consist of a talk on the speaker's research, open to the entire campus community, and a special networking dinner for our group members.

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For further information, refer to my CV (last updated: August 2024).

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Outreach is another thing I am extremely passionate about, since it allows me to apply my teaching skills to a more general audience. I regularly volunteer for the Haverford College Public Observing Team. I help with running open observatory public events at the Haverford College Strawbridge Observatory, operate the 8'' and 12'' telescopes for the public to observe different celestial objects, and give short presentations on telescopes and Astronomy. In November 2024, I will be presenting some of my research to a general audience at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, as a part of Drexel University's Start Talking Science event.

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My other hobbies include doing crafts and jigsaw puzzles, visiting museums, and hiking. Throughout elementary and middle school, I used to do semi-professional Balkan folk dancing. While I don't dance as much anymore, I still think of folk dancing as an integral part of my identity, and an amazing way for me to connect with my culture.

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Email: mkilibarda -at- haverford -dot- edu

Observations of star-forming HII regions in the optical and ultra-violet (UV) wavelengths are unable to capture all the emission lines necessary to directly calculate elemental abundances of key elements such as sulfur and argon. To compensate for the absence of empirical chemical abundance data, theoretical ionization correction functions (ICFs) have been developed. However, with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we are now able to detect the missing ions using mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy and perform direct abundance measurements. We combine new JWST data with existing optical observations from the CHAOS survey and calculate empirical abundances for sulfur and argon in 7 local HII regions. By comparing these abundances to theoretical predictions, we show theoretical ICFs tend to underpredict the total abundances of sulfur and argon. The discrepancy is larger for sulfur, and is especially prominent in high ionization regions. Once more data is available, we will be able to construct purely empirical ICFs.

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Our ability to fully interpret our results is largely dependent on the amount of data in hand. In the future, we plan to expand our sample to include highly-ionized HII regions available in the archive, as well as new follow-up observations of low-ionization HII regions. This would allow us to construct purely empirical ionization correction functions (ICFs) in both optical (as a function of O++/O) and mid-infrared wavelengths (as a function of Ne++/Ne). Additionally, we could take a direct look at existing photoionization models and try to discern why they tend to do less well in highly-ionized environments.

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I would like to thank my incredible advisors Dr. Noah Rogers and Professor Allison Strom, without whose guidance none of this work would be possible. I am grateful for the immense support I received from everyone at CIERA, especially our wonderful REU program leaders Aaron Geller and Chase Kimball. I am honored to have been a part of such an amazing cohort of young scientists, and I am looking forward to seeing what great things all of them will achieve one day.

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This work is supported by Haverford College's Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center through the Wintner/Love Summer Research Fellowship.

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This work is in part supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST 2149425, a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant awarded to CIERA at Northwestern University. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program #GO4297.

Theoretical works suggest that spiral arms behave like density waves, meaning that arm regions should have higher stellar mass surface density than the interarm region at the same radius. Previous studies of this spiral arm-interarm mass contrast have had limited sample sizes due to the challenges associated with segregating arm from interarm regions for large samples of galaxies. The MaNGA survey (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory) observed 10 000 nearby galaxies using a spectral imaging instrument (integral field units) to create maps of spectral properties for each galaxy. We make use of the Pipe3D spectral fitting analysis of the MaNGA data, which generates a variety of stellar population property maps, including stellar mass surface density. We then use Galaxy Zoo 3D (GZ3D); a citizen science project where volunteers were asked to mark locations of certain galactic features, such as spiral arms, for MaNGA target galaxies. The combination of Pipe3D and GZ3D allows us to measure the arm-interarm stellar mass surface density contrast in a large sample of galaxies. We find that there is an average fractional excess of stellar mass surface density in spiral arms across this sample which increases almost linearly with radius. We also explore how this excess stellar mass in spiral arms changes with global galaxy properties.

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Upon productive discussions with theorists working on formation of spiral features in galaxies, we decided to adjust some of our methods so that they match theoretical predictions more closely. We also examined the dependence of spiral arm overdensities on some additional global properties, such as bulge size, pitch angle, and the estimated number of spiral arms. We are currently working on preparing this work for publication.

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I would like to thank the Chesick Scholars Office at Haverford College for providing generous funding and unlimited support of my work, as well as Professor Karen Masters for her irreplaceable guidance throughout my research process. This work has made use of data from the SDSS MaNGA survey and its visualization and analysis tool Marvin (Cherinka et al. 2019), the Galaxy Zoo 3D citizen science project, TOPCAT, and the Pipe3D pipeline.