Research

Most of my academic career so far has been focused on characterizing gravitational microlensing host stars and their planets through high-resolution imaging with large telescopes (like Hubble and Keck) many years after the microlensing event. Directly measuring the light from the host star allows for precise estimates of the mass and distance of the star and the exoplanet that orbits it. Although only a dozen microlensing exoplanets have had masses directly measured through this technique, it's expected that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will utilize this method to measure the masses of a large fraction of the ~1,200 exoplanets that it will discover.


Remote observing with the Keck telescope

I have also studied the very crowded stellar population toward the center of our galaxy. These densely packed regions of the sky are optimal for the Roman microlensing mission observing strategy, and it's crucially important to understand as much as we can about these fields prior to the mission launch.

From 2020-2023 I worked on the Keck All-Sky Precision Adaptive Optics (KAPA) program as a project scientist. Specifically, I worked on a technique called point spread function reconstruction (PSF-R), which uses information about instrumental aberrations and atmospheric turbulence to reconstruct the PSF at each point in the field of view. One of the goals of KAPA is to develop a robust PSF-R suite that can accurately model the spatial and time-varying PSF across the image. This type of procedure is needed in order to conduct very high precision astrometry and photometry in AO images, particularly in crowded stellar fields like the galactic center.


As of Fall 2024, most of my effort is focused on survey design and strategy for the Roman Space Telescope's Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey (GBTDS). This survey will require very precise measurements of the positions and brightnesses of millions of stars in highly crowded galactic bulge fields. By the end of the survey, the GBTDS will represent the deepest and most continuous field of sky ever studied by humanity.