I am a Sofja Kovalevskaja group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and a graduate of Harvard Astronomy. My work focuses on Galactic structure and dynamics, inferring the distribution of interstellar dust and stars throughout the Milky Way.
My email address is my first name, middle initial and last name, all in lowercase with no punctuation, at GMail.
Astrophysical interests
I work primarily on mapping the distribution of interstellar dust in the Milky Way, based on stellar photometry, astrometry and spectroscopy. This involves inferring the distance, reddening and type of hundreds of millions to billions of stars, which serve as tracers of dust reddening versus distance. I have experience with large astronomical datasets, including SDSS, Pan-STARRS 1, 2MASS, LAMOST and Gaia, and co-led a deep optical and near-infrared photometric survey of the Southern Galactic Plane, called “DECaPS.” More broadly, I am interested in Galactic structure and dynamics, and in using Milky Way satellites to constrain cosmological models. My work relies heavily on Bayesian inference, and I have a professional and personal interest in machine learning techniques.
Earthly Interests
A few things I'm interested in outside of astrophysics.