Indiana University
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Faculty | Katherine L. Rhode

Katherine RhodeAssistant Professor, Ph.D.
Astronomy, Yale University, 2003

Contact Information:

Astronomy Department
Indiana University
Swain West
727 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
Phone: (812) 855-6925
Fax: (812) 855-8725
Email: krhode [at] indiana.edu

Biographical Information

Katherine Rhode joined the IU Astronomy faculty in August 2007. After receiving a B.A. in Physics from Sonoma State University in 1989, she held positions at the Maria Mitchell Observatory, NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She earned an M.A. in Astronomy at Wesleyan University in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Astronomy at Yale University in 2003. From 2003 to 2006, she was an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow with a joint appointment at Wesleyan and Yale Universities.

Research Interests

Dr. Rhode's primary research area is the origin and evolution of massive galaxies. She studies how giant galaxies form by quantifying the ensemble properties of their globular cluster systems. She has ongoing projects to survey the globular cluster systems of spiral, lenticular, and elliptical galaxies with wide-field CCD detectors and to study the kinematics and dynamics of extragalactic globular cluster systems with multi-object spectrographs like WIYN/Hydra, AAT/2dF and Keck/DEIMOS.

In addition to her research on galaxies, Dr. Rhode also studies the rotational evolution of young, solar-type stars.  She has used WIYN/Hydra to measure the rotational velocities of hundreds of T Tauri stars located in Galactic open clusters like the Orion Nebula Cluster, IC 348, and NGC 2264.

Teaching
  • A452:  Extragalactic Astrophysics (Fall 2008)
  • A505:  Principles and Techniques of Observational Astronomy (Spring 2008)
  • A780:  Graduate Seminar on Stellar Populations in Galaxies (Fall 2007)
Selected Publications