Welcome to my website! I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Astronomy at the University of Florida.
With my advisor Prof. Sarah Ballard,
I study exoplanets around the smallest and coolest stars.
I recieved my Bachelor's degree in Astronomy & Physics
from Boston University in 2020. In the past, I have been a
Flatiron Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the
Center for Computational Astrophysics
at the Flatiron Institute,
an intern at the
Kepler/K2 Guest Observer office
at NASA Ames Research Center and the
FastML group
at CERN.
Click here to download my CV.
The orbital eccentricity-radius relation for small planets is indicative of the predominant dynamical sculpting processes during late-stage orbital evolution.
We investigate this trend for a sample of smaller M dwarf stars.
For a sample of 236 single- and multi-transit planets discovered by the TESS and Kepler missions,
we constrain orbital eccentricity for each planet from the transit photometry together with a stellar density prior.
We present evidence for a positive eccentricity-radius relationship with elevated eccentricities for planets larger than 3.5 R_earth,
similar to the trend for planets orbiting Sun-like stars. We find modest evidence that single-transit M dwarf planets near
the radius gap exhibit higher eccentricity, consistent with trends for Sun-like stars. However, we see no evidence for an increased
eccentricity near the radius gap among multi-transit M dwarf planets. This work has been submitted to AJ and is in review as of July 2025.
Stellar age measurements are fundamental to understanding a wide range of astronomical processes,
including Galactic dynamics, stellar evolution, and planetary system formation.
However, extracting age information from main-sequence stars is complicated, with techniques
often relying on age proxies in the absence of direct measurements.
We leverage high-precision astrometric data from Gaia DR3 to construct a stellar age prediction
model based only on stellar dynamical properties, namely the vertical action.
We calibrate hierarchical stellar age–vertical action relations,
employing asteroseismic ages for red-giant-branch stars isochrone ages
for main-sequence turn-off stars. We describe a framework called zoomies based on this calibration,
by which we can infer ages for any star given its vertical action.
This tool is open-source and intended for community use.
Leveraging the
photoeccentric effect
, we combine Kepler transit light curves
with stellar density information from spectroscopy and parallaxes from Gaia to
constrain the orbital eccentricities for over 150 planets around nearby M dwarfs.
Within a Bayesian hierarchical framework, we draw out the underlyling eccentricity
distribution for planets around M dwarfs and find two distinct populations:
single-transit, higher eccentricity planets and multi-transit, low-eccentricity planets.
We use planet occurrence information to constrain the volume-limited occurrence rate
of eccentric M dwarf planets. Read the paper in PNAS
As an undergraduate at Boston University, I worked with my advisors Prof. Philip Muirhead and Dr. Julie Skinner to constrain the
upper limit of planet occurrence around late-M and early-L dwarfs (or "ultracool dwarfs") in our local neighborhood. We conducted
a planet search around 827 ultracool dwarfs observed by NASA's K2 mission, and found none. Using this null result,
we constrained the upper limit of planet occurrence around ultracool dwarfs in the local neighborhood,
accounting for our transit detection efficiency and transit probability.
I published an open-source Python package called zoomies, which is an open-source tool to constrain stellar ages using only kinematic information
(vertical action from Gaia), a galactic potential model, and an external stellar calibration
sample. The package includes tools to calibrate a stellar age--vertical action relation and apply it to
your desired stellar sample. Since the age relation comes from purely kinematic information (galactic orbits),
the relation is nearly completely mass-independent, meaning you can use this tool to constrain ages for any stars
from supergiants to M dwarfs!
I also published an open-source Python package called photoeccentric,
which includes a suite of tools to process Kepler transit lightcurves,
calculate stellar densities, and perform transit fitting to constrain
eccentricities using only photometric data + stellar density priors.
I contribute to lightkurve,
a user-friendly, open-source Python package for working with Kepler, K2, and TESS data.
