Welcome to my webpage! I am an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My research focuses on studying exoplanets, or planets which orbit stars other than the Sun. I am interested in developing cutting-edge techniques and methods to discover new planets outside of our solar system, and studying the planets we find to learn their detailed properties. Eventually, I hope to help answer questions like "Are the planets orbiting other stars throughout the galaxy anything like the worlds in our Solar system?" and "Could any of these planets be hospitable to life like the Earth?". To learn more about my research interests, please visit my Research page. To learn about the members of my team, please visit my Group Members webpage.
Previously, I was an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin (2017-2020), after receiving my Ph.D. from Harvard University in May 2017. In graduate school, I developed a method to remove systematic noise from data collected by NASA's K2 mission and released the full processed dataset to the public. The dataset is available for download from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at Space Telescope Science Institute, and additional resources are available on my graduate-school era webpage.
As part of my PhD thesis, I created an online tutorial to teach people how astronomers study exoplanets using data from telescopes like NASA's Kepler and TESS missions. I created most of the plot images in the tutorial (in particular, all of the images not credited to someone else); anyone who wishes to use these images in their own work may feel feel free to do and attribute them to me. Please feel free to reach out to me though, as I can provide higher resolution (vector graphics) versions of the plots. I also like to hear about it when someone finds the images useful.