Jacob Bruns Email & Phone Number

Idyllwild, Ca

In conjunction with my various roles under the Science Instructor position at Astrocamp, I occasionally take on the role of camp administrator on the weekends at Astrocamp in the place of the program director and assistant program directors who have the weekend off. As the weekend admin, I coordinate program schedule, communicating with chaperones and camp staff. Instructed chaperones on their responsibilities. I also am there to assist with first aid when needed, and to be on call to help with any emergencies. I also facilitate the camp program, which involves many jobs, including monitoring and determining if the weather would be suitable for using telescopes each night, repairing broken or malfunctioning apparatus, performing rescues of children who needed help getting off a ropes course element, driving airport or hospital runs for staff or students, or working project hours on improving program classes, etc.

Idyllwild, Ca

I work with teaching students (ranging from 3rd-12th grade) hands-on science and engineering with a focus on introductory physics and astronomy, but also outdoor education. The science instructor position at Astrocamp includes a lot of roles, ranging from instructing, to operating the ropes courses, telescopes, presenting planetarium shows, and coordinating camp program. During school year, schools bring their kids to Astrocamp on 3-5 day field trips. During the summer, it becomes a 1-2 week stay-away summer camp.

Boulder, Colorado

To earn my Master's Degree, I worked with Phil Armitage as a research assistant, where I conducted my own research project on a subject in planet formation called "Trapping Zones." For this project, I learned the programming language Python, as well as developed a modified version of the MERCURY software integration package to perform n-body simulations of late-stage planet formation. In particular, I looked at how the initial conditions for planet formation affected the resulting system, and offered a solution to a common problem in previous models where gravitational scattering dominated the evolution of the system and hindered the growth of massive gas giant planet cores in the outer system. This project became my Master's thesis, which I defended successfully in a presentation that I gave to both faculty and peers, as well as a closed-door Q&A testing session where I was asked questions about my research and related physical topics before a committee of faculty and researchers.

Boulder, Colorado

In graduate school, I began work as a Teaching Assistant for a college intro-level astronomy course and lab. I first worked as a "Lecture TA" where I sat in on my professor's lectures, and assisted him in the class as needed (handling tests, activities, supervising students and making sure they followed the honor code and various lecture rules), graded all homework and exams for several hundred students every week, held office hours to help students with their work and answer their questions, and taught review sessions at the beginning of the course (for students that needed a refresher on the Math required for the course), and before every exam.Next, I worked as "Lab TA" where I hosted and taught a lab for the course. I would teach two different lab sections, which would both meet once a week, and grade all the lab reports the following weekend to hand back to students the next week. The lab itself consisted of experiments and activities related to topics in the course to give students a hand on experience with the physics and scientific method. I introduced the lab, occasionally teaching topics that had not yet been covered in lecture that were required for the lab, and then supervised the students as they worked, walking around to help them out when needed, and answer their questions.As both a Lecture and a Lab TA I also hosted observing nights for the students, as well as Friday Night Open House at Sommers-Bausch Observatory. Here I would work with another TA on operating the telescopes and finding good observation targets for the observatory visitors, and answer their questions and talk to them about what it was they were looking at. For the students, they would be required to do a lab, much like their day labs, where they were to analyze the observation targets we chose, which could include the moon, planets, binary stars, diffuse and planetary nebula, globular and open clusters, and sometimes galaxies.

Santa Cruz, California

In college, I worked with Jonathan Fortney on a small project comparing the atmospheres of "Hot Jupiter" exoplanets to that of a substellar class of objects known as Brown Dwarfs, from photometry-based Spitzer Space Telescope observations. This project became my Bachelor's Thesis. I was hired as a full-time paid intern the summer of 2011 from June to July. For this job, I learned (self-taught + one programming course) the IDL and Fortran programming languages. The research I did has been featured in a paper published in the Astrophysics Journal (ApJ) by Thomas Beatty et al. 2014, of which I am a co-author.

Greater Chicago Area

My first job was working as a "science minor" at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The first year I worked there as a volunteer, and the second year I worked as a paid intern. While the primary job I had was interacting with museum visitors, giving science table presentations and activities, typically related to one exhibit or another. Occasionally I would also do interactive chemistry experiments with the visitors. In addition to this, I also supervised/maintained exhibit areas to keep them in order and talk with museum visitors about the exhibit. Lastly I spent a summer helping design the light physics portion of the current Science Storms exhibit, which is currently on display.

Master'S Degree, Astrophysical And Planetary Sciences (Master'S Or Phd)

Bachelor'S Degree, Physics (Astrophysics)