Welcome!

I am an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. My research focuses on the detection and characterization of exoplanets, with the aim of providing a better understanding of how they form and evolve in different environments. I primarily do this using data from ground-based telescopes and large datasets from space missions like TESS. I am currently investigating the differences between the orbits, atmospheres, and host stars of giant planets and brown dwarfs to distinguish their formation mechanisms.

I earned my PhD in Astrophysics in 2023 from the University of California, Berkeley. As a PhD student, I worked with Professor Courtney Dressing to discover exoplanets using TESS and gain new insight into how properties like stellar mass and metallicity influence planetary populations. My thesis was particularly concerned with the discovery of hot, terrestrial planets that would make favorable targets for JWST and the demographics of planets orbiting hot stars. While working towards my degree, I gained an expertise in observational astronomy, having collected data using ground-based telescopes all over the world across more than 100 nights.

I got my start in astrophysics research as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where I worked with Professor Arieh Konigl on numerical experiments involving planetary migration and the radial transport of dust in protoplanetary disks via magnetocentrifugal disk winds. I earned my bachelor’s degree in Physics with a specialization in Astrophysics in 2017 from the University of Chicago.