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Department of Physics and Astronomy

Mallory Molina

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Dr. Mallory Molina is an assistant professor of physics & astronomy at Vanderbilt University. They were previously an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, a Sloan Minority Ph.D. Scholar, a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow and the first Eccles Astrodata Postdoctoral Fellow, and their research is supported by NSF and NASA.

Molina is deeply committed to creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment in the field of astronomy and science in general. They were the creator and co-founder of Towards a More Inclusive Astronomy (TaMIA) when they were a graduate student at Penn State. This group has now expanded to be a non-profit that supports other groups across the country. Inspired by Molina's work, other science departments at Penn State have created their own groups under the name of TaMIS, or Towards a More Inclusive Science. In addition to their work with TaMIA, Molina has been asked to deliver talks and provide advice on diversity and inclusion-related efforts at multiple institutions across the country.

In addition to science and inclusion efforts, Molina is committed to effective and inclusive teaching. They developed curriculum for a laboratory class for non-majors at Penn State and will be teaching ASTR-2110: The Solar System in Fall 2024.

Specializations

My research interests involve studying black holes and star formation in massive and dwarf galaxies. I am most interested in understanding how black holes and their host galaxies interact with one another, and finding massive black holes in dwarf galaxies. My goal is to use this information to understand how black holes and their host galaxies grow over cosmic time.


Representative Publications

First Author Publications

  • Molina, M., Duffy, L., Eracleous, M., Ogborn, M., Kaldor, M. E., Yan, R., Gronwall, C., Ciardullo, R., & Ajgaonkar, N. 2023, “Second Data Release of the Swift/UVOT+MaNGA (SwiM) Value-added Catalog”, ApJS, 268, 63 (Link to Data)
  • Molina, M., Reines, A. E., Latimer, L. J., Baldassare, V., & Salehirad, S. 2021,“A Sample of Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies Detected via [Fe x] Coronal Line Emission: Active Galactic Nuclei and/or Tidal Disruption Events”, ApJ, 922, 155
  • Molina, M., Reines, A. E., Greene, J. E., Darling, J. & Condon, J. J. 2021, “Outflows, Shocks and Coronal Line Emission in a Radio-Selected AGN in a Dwarf Galaxy”, ApJ, 910, 5
  • Molina, M., Ajgaonkar, N., Yan, R., Ciardullo, R., Gronwall, C., Eracleous, M., Ji, X. & Blanton, M. R. 2020, “Swift/UVOT+MaNGA Data Catalog”, ApJS, 251, 11
  • Molina, M., Ajgaonkar, N., Yan, R., Ciardullo, R., Gronwall, C., Eracleous, M., Boquien, M. & Schneider, D. P. 2020, “A Cautionary Tale of Attenuation in Star Forming Regions”, MNRAS, 494, 4751
  • Molina, M., Eracleous, M., Barth, A. J., Maoz, D., Runnoe, J. C., Ho, L. C., Shields, J. C. & Walsh, J. L. 2018,“The Shocking Power Sources of LINERs”, ApJ, 864, 90