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 use large surveys to study the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way. I have developed several widely used 3D maps of the distribution of interstellar dust in the Milky Way, based on stellar photometry, astrometry and spectroscopy of hundreds of millions to billions of stars. I also use stellar kinematics to map out the gravitational potential of the Milky Way, which contains information about the distribution of both baryonic and dark matter. 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 (DECaPS). My work relies heavily on Bayesian inference and on computational tools developed for machine learning, which I apply in physically informed ways.
Earthly Interests
A few things I'm interested in outside of astrophysics.