The foundation of my research program is in astrophysics, where almost all of our knowledge of the universe beyond our solar system derives from detecting light that has been emitted, absorbed, or scattered by atoms. Fascinating phenomena occur over times often too fast for us to recognize without instruments and an understanding of the fundamental physics. For example, collisions between atoms take place in a femtosecond, but averaging over billions of collisions, the spectrum of starlight is encoded with the temperature, pressure, and composition inside a star light years away, to be seen by us and decoded years after the light left the star. Similarly in our everyday world, our eyes and brain average over the scenes we perceive. We do not sense the sequence of images that make a movie, the pattern of footfalls for a galloping horse, or the time it takes for a flash of lightning to scatter within a cloud. My work deals with how the nature of the atoms and their environment is encoded in the light, and how we can extract information about the light source and the intervening matter from the photons which reach us.

My fundamental research in astronomy and astrophysics is in collaboration with Dr. Nicole Allard of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, France, Drs. Bradley Carter and Duncan Wright of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and Dr. Karen Collins of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard. Precision photometry, astronomical and laboratory spectroscopy, the theory of atomic spectral line formation, and radiative transport theory are used to determine physical conditions in laboratory plasmas, stars, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets. Ground-based astronomical observations and analysis of transiting planets are made as part of the follow-up program of the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellte (TESS) mission. Graduate students in my research group are studying exoplanets in search of evidence of their atmospheres and habitability, and the formation of new stars with planets in our own galaxy.

With Dr. Frank O. Clark (University of Louisville) we have current applied research  to develop  and demonstrate technology for sensitive time-domain optical and infrared remote sensing.