I have been in love with the night sky since a sixth-grade trip to the planetarium and have been lucky enough to turn that fascination into a profession.
I study stars and stellar systems — from binary pairs of stars to stellar clusters — using computational modeling and simulation methods.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University. Previously, I have been an Einstein Fellow and postdoctoral Member of the Institute for Theory and computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a postdoctoral Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey.
I did my doctoral research at the University of California, in Santa Cruz, where I was advised by Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. I was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, where I discovered the power and beauty of computational physics in a class with my eventual thesis advisor, Thomas Baumgarte.
In high school in Maine, I began my pursuit of astronomy as a science with observations of variable stars and asteroids. I discovered two new variable stars in the open star cluster NGC 637 and measured the rotation of asteroids with a telescope in (our generous neighbor’s) backyard.
Outside of work, I enjoy photography, cycling, and escaping out into nature with my family.
