I am currently a fifth year graduate student at Michigan State University in the department of Physics and Astronomy.
I work with Professor Wolfgang Kerzendorf and the
Kerzendorf Group modeling stars and searching for
surviving companions of type Ia supernovae to learn about their progenitor systems and test
different progenitor theories. I use statistical methods capitalizing on the revolutionary new GAIA
mission as well as archival Hubble data to investigate the stellar populations in supernova
remnants. I work at the intersection of observation and theory, making detailed models of stellar
atmospheres to simulate escaping stellar light and then fitting those models to observations to
learn about the structure and composition of stars.
I work on and help maintain the open-source Stardis
code, which solves the radiative transfer equation in the outer layers of a star to simulate
light passing through it.
I also help run Michigan State's astrophysics journal club, Astro Coffee! We meet twice a week to
discuss new papers posted on Arxiv and recent developments in astrophysics. We have hybrid in
person/virtual meetings that are welcome to anybody that would like to join.
In my free time I like to play racquetball, ride my bike, longboard, snowboard. I also love all
sorts of games, from board games, to videogames, to card games.
This is the SN 1006 supernova remnant - a Type Ia remnant that lies only about 2 Kiloparsecs
away.
It's where I've done my first systematic search for a surviving Type Ia companion that you can read more
about below!
I've also done work analyzing data from the MUSE IFU instrument
on the Very Large Telescope on four confirmed Type Ia remnants in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The
LMC is offers a unique laboratory to search for the surviving companions of Type Ia Supernovae,
because unlike our Galaxy, the entire remnants are free from obscuring foreground dust. I'm working
on a pipeline to systematically extract the spectra of the hundreds to thousands of stars in each
remnant, then compare each spectra to stellar models to get an understanding of each star. Once
that's done, I'll be able to look for weird, outstanding objects that could be long-sought surviving
companions of our Type Ias!
I recently completed a project investigating the stellar population in the SN1006 remnant, using
multi-year baseline astrometry to recover the proper motions of faint stars, in order to test one of
the most promising recent Type Ia progenitor scenarios. Read that paper here!
In the past
I have worked on the ASAS-SN team to
discover new supernovae in low redshift galaxies.