RESEARCH

My research consists of both theoretical and observational astronomy. Much of my PhD work was spent examining supernova remnants to search for the surviving companions of Type Ia Supernovae. The rest was spent developing the open-source STARDIS code, which simulates light going through stellar atmospheres to help us understand the structure and composition of stars.

I've performed a systematic surviving companion search of the SNR 0509-67.5 remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud by combining archival Hubble Space Telescope imaging to allow for Bayesian inference of astrophysical parameters of the enclosed stellar population.

I've also 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!

Before I came to MSU, I worked with the ASAS-SN team to discover new supernovae and other transients in low redshift galaxies.