About me
Greetings, and welcome to my homepage. I am an Associate Professor of Astronomy at New Mexico State University.
My research focuses on fundamental processes of planet formation theory, such as the nature of turbulence in circumstellar disks, streaming instability, and pebble accretion, enabling direct comparisons with observational evidence from exoplanets and the Solar system.
I am one of the principal investigators in the PFITS+ collaboration, involving six institutions and nearly 20 members.
Research Interests
Planet formation, exoplanets, accretion disks, planet migration; fluid mechanics, magnetohydrodynamics, dust dynamics, radiative transfer. Icy shell convection, active galactic nuclei. Code development, supercomputing. You can read more about my research here
Latest news
- Dec 2025: Paper submitted! Led by Anders Johansen, on connecting streaming instability and pebble accretion.
- Dec 2025: Paper submitted! Led by graduate student Harrison Cook, on transients in AGN disks.
Acknowledgments
My research is currently funded by NSF via grant AST-2511672, the NASA Emerging Worlds Program via grant 22-EW22-0005, and the NASA Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics Networks program via grant 20-TCAN20-0011. My supercomputer needs are supported by the NMSU Discovery cluster, NASA Pleiades supercluster, and XSEDE/TACC Stampede3 through allocation TG-AST140014.
Former groups
I received my Ph.D. in February 2009 from Uppsala University, Sweden. Before joining the faculty at NMSU, I did postdocs at NASA-JPL/Caltech, as a Sagan fellow (class of 2011, currently the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program - NHFP), and at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. I was also a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), in Heidelberg, Germany.
I am a proud member of the Astronomy Outlist of LGBT+ members of the astronomical community.