Broadly, my interests fall into two categories:
Interactions (stellar binary evolution and mergers, short-period exoplanets and circumbinaries, AGNs and TDEs, variable stars, satellite galaxies, cataclysmic variables, Type 1a supernovae, and compact object mergers)
Origins (protostars and protoplanetary disks, planetary formation, young star clusters, and galaxy formation)
I’m interested in the ways that celestial objects evolve and affect each other, and how their current behavior can be understood through past interactions. Below are the projects I’ve worked on to date:
The Ohio State University, Department of Astronomy September 2023—present
Advisor: Chris Kochanek, Ph.D.
- Examining late-time spectra taken by observers associated with ASAS-SN of Tidal Disruption Events (TDE), many of them months and years after the initial TDE event
- Analyzing spectra for patterns in the long-term evolution of TDEs
- Comparing evolution of optical spectra to known changes in radio and UV detected from other TDEs
The Ohio State University, Department of Astronomy May 2022—September 2023
Completed as part of OSU Summer Undergraduate Research Program
Advisors: David Martin, Ph.D.; Alexander Stephan, Ph.D.
- Modeled the evolution of large populations of binary stars using the program COSMIC developed by Katelyn Breivik et al.
- Based on models, simulated the percentage of stellar/compact object binary pairs which might appear in a population throughout time
- Compared the formation rate of these binaries to the formation rates of objects which might be falsely identified as a stellar/compact object pair
- Identified ages of stellar populations which might theoretically make them more likely to contain a black hole or neutron star
- Observed that compact objects are much more likely to be found around main sequence stars than red giants, particularly at ages between 10 Myrs and 1 Gyr
- First-author paper submitted to MNRAS, currently undergoing revision