Jason E. Ybarra

Jason E. Ybarra is a Teaching Assistant Professor and serves as the Director of the WVU Planetarium and Observatory. Dr. Ybarra’s research interests include galactic star formation, protostellar outflows, physics education, and the history of astronomy. They earned a Ph.D. from the University of Florida where, as a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program (GSRP) fellow and a NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium fellow, they studied how star formation progresses through the Rosette Molecular Cloud by analyzing the stellar and gas content of embedded clusters. They also earned a M.S. in Physics from San Francisco State University, where as a graduate student, they co-discovered the first observational evidence of a precessing jet carving out a protostellar envelope. Dr. Ybarra's postdoctoral work at the Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM-Ensenada) involved characterizing mid-infrared emission from star-forming regions, studying protostellar outflow interactions, and developing astro-statistical methods. They also served as the editor of the "This Month in Astronomical History" column (2019-2020) for the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society (HAD-AAS), as well as being a frequent contributing author. They are a member of the American Astronomical Society and the Society of Indigenous Astronomers.