Meet the 2025 CUB Astrophysics TAs!
Welcome to the CUB Astrophysics blog. Throughout the next several weeks, participants will be posting daily stories and reflections. Tomorrow is arrival day, and the faculty are excited to meet all the students – we have been preparing the whole week long. Below is a short introduction to your wonderful TAs.
From left to right: Mikael, Treya, Wenxi, and Marcus, the 2025 CUB Astrophysics program TAs.
TA Treya (She/Her)
TA Treya grew up just outside of Boulder in Erie, CO and graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelors in Astrophysics this May. At Wellesley, she used a 27” telescope to confirm exoplanets for NASA and worked on axion dark matter detectors (Ask me more!). She loves telescopes, baseball (Go Sox!), and Star Wars, and grew a padawan braid through her undergraduate training. You can also find Treya hiking, reading, or drinking tea.
TA Marcus (He/Him)
TA Marcus grew up in California, Texas, Florida and Colorado. He just completed a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has worked on robotics, aircraft design, and mentoring younger students while in college, and will be going to flight school after the summer. He enjoys playing/watching most sports, and is passionate about anything air, space, or music related.
TA Wenxi (She/Her)
TA Wenxi grew up in Brooklyn, NY and graduated with a double-degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, College Park with high honors. She is passionate about cosmology, gravity, cosmic inflation, high energy physics, and anything related to the fundamental rules of our universe! Even though she has been a theorist for most of her academic journey, she built a theremin from scratch with microcontrollers in the lab this spring! In her free time, Wenxi enjoys playing the piano and the guitar, knitting and crocheting, watching mystery TV shows, and doing mini crosswords.
TA Mikael (He/Him)
TA Mikael grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. He studied physics at St. Olaf College and completed a series of internships at a local electrical engineering company. He will be returning for a 4th internship later this summer before studying for a PhD at the University of Oxford. He will be modeling and simulating terawatt-scale solar generation. In his free time, Mikael enjoys playing broomball, field hockey, badminton, board games, and card games. He is passionate about renewable energy, but he is brand new to astronomy.
