Research

My research interests include debris disks, extrasolar planetary systems, abundances of stars with debris disks and/or planets, and stellar chemical abundances in general. Currently, I am using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to examine late B and early A dwarfs in 3 young open clusters, spanning ages of a few million years up to 100 million years, to identify which stars show infrared excesses characteristic of debris disks. Mid- and far-infrared flux densities enable us to detect debris disks and determine the frequency of such disks as a function of age, and may also permit advancements to be made toward characterizing disk properties as a function of age. My advisor is Caty Pilachowski.

I participated in Indiana University's REU program before I started graduate school here. Check out the Summer 2002 REU website. I used extremely high resolution spectra to determine abundances of a few stars with planets.