Research Goals

Currently, my major research goals are:

1. To make progress towards constructing a complete model of the mechanisms by which hot Jupiters form (and to what extent these processes overlap with the formation mechanisms of longer-period, Jupiter-sized planets). There are three main migration mechanisms for hot Jupiters (see figure below), and I aim to use a combination of observational data and dynamical methods to determine which mechanism is important in what physical regime.
2. To understand the populations of unseen objects in our solar system and beyond. Exoplanet observations have come a long way in the past decades, but there are large regions in every exoplanet system where planets could reside and not be detectable. I aim to use dynamical methods to better map these understudied regions which cannot be probed by observations alone.