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 planets form and evolve in different environments. I primarily do this using data from ground-based telescopes and large datasets from space missions like TESS. My current work inolves the measurement of misalignments between the equators of stars and the orbits of their planets. Conventional planet formation theory predicts that planetary orbits should begin well-aligned with the stellar equator (like they are in the Solar System), yet many planets are observed to have largely misaligned orbits. By uncovering dependencies between these misalignments and properties like planet mass, we can uncover how these misalignments grow (e.g., due to dynamical interactions between planets) as well as how they shrink (e.g., due to star-planet tidal interactions).

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 A-type stars, which are roughly twice as large and nearly twice as hot as the Sun. 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.