About Me
Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
Hello!
How I got here: The combination of realizing I didn't want to be a zoologer, reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, and venturing into the world of Doctor Who turned my attention to space and astronomy.
When I then realized NASA has a height restriction between 62-75 inches tall*, I had to give up on my dream of being an astronaut (at least for the time being...) However, I still had a passion for space. I was fortunate enough to take an astronomy class in high school which propelled me into studying astronomy in college.
I did my undergraduate studies at Haverford College majoring in Astrophysics and wrote my undergraduate thesis on the magnetic field of the Smith Cloud (the cover photo on my home page!).
I obtained a PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. I studied the accretion properties of young low mass brown dwarfs and planetary companions along with looking for icy dust grains in circumstellar disks around young stars. The location of this ice gives clues to the size of dust grains and whether the disks could have the right environments for giant gas planets to form.
I have also studied how the environment surrounding natal cores in molecular clouds affect the evolution of the cores and the eventual birth of stars along with the environments of mid redshift galaxies to determine how quenching or starbursting affects their evolution into present day galaxies.
I then worked at Space Telescope Science Institute as a STScI postdoctoral fellow. I studied ices in the debris disk around β Pictoris, as well as worked on the calibration pipeline as a member of the Roman Telescope Branch.
I have recently made the switch into data science in industry and am exploring a whole new field!
When not studying space environments, I can usually be found out in the earth environment — I greatly enjoy hiking, watching sunsets and waterfalls, and if possible, taking selfies with cacti.
* https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/606877main_FS-2011-11-057-JSC-astro_trng.pdf - page 2 paragraph 3