Welcome!

I'm an astronomer at both the University of California in Berkeley and the SETI Institute. I like to investigate what kinds of planetary systems exist in our galactic neighborhood and how those collections of planets, asteroids, comets, dust, and gas change over time.

At Berkeley, I focus on direct imaging of young circumstellar dust disks (like our Kuiper Belt) and Jupiter-like planets (still warm from their formation) to learn about the outer reaches of systems. At SETI, I work with the Unistellar Citizen Science network to analyze transiting exoplanets observations, particularly those with long-period orbits that need monitoring until they can be studied in detail with more powerful telescopes.

Here's the Berkeley press release for my latest paper, which presents 26 circumstellar "debris disks" imaged in detail via 4 years of observations by the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES). This study, only possible with contributions from the entire GPIES team, gives us an unprecedented collection of views into young planetary systems still organizing themselves during and just after planets have formed. The public version is on arXiv and the published journal article is available through the ADS listing.

Apart from that, please check out the tabs above to learn more about me and my research!