About Me

Started from the Bottom*

My excellent high school teacher, Dr. Edmundo Nunes, inspired me to pursue physics. Over a gap year between high school and college, I was first exposed to scientific research through assisting Adric Riedel and Emily Rice on a new algorithm for identifying young stellar moving groups. I like to tell more junior students about the ~10 times I had to email Emily before she finally agreed to let me work with her. Persistence is important! 

I graduated with honors in mathematical physics from Brown University in 2017. In college, I explored several research areas in astrophysics through the National Solar Observatory REU, the SETI REU, and the Stanford Leadership Alliance. I also led Brown Science Prep, a student group that wrote and taught original STEM lessons for local public high school students. 

My major undergraduate research project involved collaboratively designing and benchmarking an efficient orbit-fitting algorithm ("Orbits for the Impatient," or OFTI) for directly-imaged exoplanets with Eric Nielsen, Bruce Macintosh, and the Gemini Planet Imager team. Since undergrad, I've worked closely with Jason Wang to develop this project into orbitize!, an open-source Python package for direct-imaging astrometry orbit-fitting that makes the OFTI algorithm publicly available. The orbitize! collaboration has grown to over 35 contributors over the past few years, and our package is now used widely in the field of exoplanet orbit-fitting.

Over the summer of my third year of grad school, I did a research internship at Google, working with the Image Search Ranking team on deep learning for multi-modal image recognition and language understanding tasks. I wrote up a document summarizing my experience applying, which I'm happy to share upon request.

One of my favorite grad school projects has been designing, teaching, and hosting Code/Astro, a week-long software development workshop for astronomers, working primarily with Jason Wang. Since our first year in June 2020, the program has more than tripled in size!

Now We're Here

I'm primarily working in two research areas: 1) the orbits (and particularly eccentricities) of giant exoplanets, and 2) stellar variability and its implications for our understanding of young planetary systems. My interests also include high-resolution spectroscopy, searching for reflected-light signatures of hot Jupiters, optimizing the radial velocity technique, optical interferometry, and statistics and computation generally. I'm an expert in Gaussian Process regression, wavelength calibration for extreme-precision radial velocity instruments, radial velocity signal understanding, orbit-fitting for directly-imaged companions, Bayesian statistics, and software development with Python and C/C++. See my CV for a complete list of relevant publications (and keep an eye on the arXiv for upcoming ones).

I'm passionate (maybe angry is a better word) about social justice in academic and non-academic spheres, and spend a lot of time mentoring junior students in formal and informal capacities. I also spend time organizing in my local community, especially around issues of housing and homelessness. 

Besides astrophysics, service, and teaching, I like to run long distances in the woods, sing, and play the cello. I also enjoy baking, but I'm pretty terrible at it. My life goal is to meet Rosie of Rosie's Dessert Spot. If you can make that happen, please let me know.

*not really... I started from a position of privilege. At the same time, I'm proud of what I've overcome, how hard I've worked, and how much I've learned.