About me
Greetings, and welcome to my homepage. I am an associate professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University.
My research focuses around computer simulations of planet formation in circumstellar disks. A goal of this research is to establish a model that combines all the necessary physics to simulate the formation of planetary systems, and enable comparisons with the astronomical observations.
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
- Jul 2024: paper published.
- Jul 2024: Attending the dustbusters conference at ESO Garching.
- Jun 2024: Attending AAS summer meeting in Madison WI.
- May 2024: Invited talk at New Horizons Science Team Meeting #56, at Johns Hopkins APL.
- May 2024: Invited talk at conference 50 yrs of binaries and disks. Steve Lubow's 75th birthday, in Las Vegas.
- Apr 2024: Nomination to C-USA.
- Apr 2024: Talk at NRAO, in Socorro NM.
- Apr 2024: Paper submitted! Led by David Rea, graduate student at ISU, from our TCAN collaboration, on non-ideal MHD turbulence. [June update: accepted]
- Mar 2024: Visiting colleagues in Australia. Mark Wardle at Macqurie University, Sydney; Daniel Price and Evgeni Grishin at Monash University, Melbourne; and Christoph Federrath at Australian National University, Canberra.
- Feb 2024: First author paper submitted, on vortex trapping. [June update: accepted]
- Feb 2024: Paper accepted, led by Zsolt Sandor, on planetesimal formation in dust traps.
- Feb 2024: Colloquium at UNM.
- Jan 2024: Story on NMSU News on our new grant.
- Jan 2024: Paper accepted! Led by grad student Manny Canas, on densities of KBOs explained by streaming instability and pebble accretion.
- Jan 2024: Paper submitted! Led by postdoc Debanjan Sengupta, on mesoscale properties of shear turbulence. [Feb update: accepted]
- Dec 2023: EW grant awarded! Science PI Debanjan Sengupta. The grant will support work on synergy between streaming instability and turbulent concentration.
- Dec 2023: Paper submitted! Led by Jay Lim, graduate student at ISU, from our TCAN collaboration, on streaming instability in Hall shear turbulence.
Acknowledgments
My research is currently funded by the NASA Emerging Worlds Program, the NASA Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics Networks program via grant 20-TCAN20-0011, and NSF via grant AST-2007422. My supercomputer needs are supported by the NMSU Discovery cluster and XSEDE/TACC Stampede2, 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), 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.