Research Interests
I study planet and brown dwarf atmospheres in an effort to better understand the formation and evolution of these objects. I also search for directly imaged planets to try to constrain formation environments of actively accreting planets.
Atmospheric Studies of Transiting Exoplanets with JWST
Northrop Grumman
I am part of the largest JWST Cycle 1 and 2 GO programs dedicated to exoplanet science. The former is the Compositions of Mini-Planet Atmospheres for Statistical Study (COMPASS) program, which is looking at 12 super-Earths/sub-Neptunes with NIRSpec/G395H (see the paper that I led on the first COMPASS observation here). The latter is the Giant Exoplanets around M-dwarf Stars (GEMS) program, which is looking at 7 gas giant planets around M-dwarfs with NIRSpec/PRISM. I'm also Co-PI on a Cycle 3 AR program to study ways of mitigating correlated noise in NIRSpec observations of small planets, PI of a Cycle 4 program to study the super-Jupiter TOI-2109b, and Co-PI of a Cycle 4 program to follow up one of the GEMS targets.
Characterization of Protoplanetary Disks Directly Imaged with Keck/NIRC2
ESO/L. Calçada
Using NIRC2 on Keck, I directly image protoplanetary disks in an effort to directly detect young planets that could be forming in them. I also directly model these disks to better understand the physical morphologies and dust grain distributions of these disks at infrared wavelengths. You can see the results from the survey of protoplanetary disks that I led here.
Atmospheric Studies of Ultra-cool Brown Dwarf Atmospheres using Keck/NIRSPEC and Magellan/FIRE
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Using high-resolution spectra obtained from NIRSPEC on Keck and low-resolution time-resolved FIRE spectra, I study the the atmospheric compositions of ultra-cool brown dwarfs. I am currently working on doing atmospheric retrievals of late-T brown dwarfs using this data to try to ascertain why atmospheric models are notoriously poor matches to the data of these objects.
Transiting Gas Giant Exoplanet Atmospheric Characterization using the Spitzer Space Telescope
NASA/JPL-Caltech
I use Spitzer secondary eclipses to probe the thermal emission of gas giant planets. I've searched for trends in the atmospheric metallicity of cool planet atmospheres and looked at the population of all gas giant planets with Spitzer secondary eclipse detections to see if we can find population-level trends in circulation patterns and atmospheric chemistry.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Illingworth, Magee, Whitaker, Bouwens, Oesch, & Hubble Legacy Field team