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.
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
- Mar 2025: Selected for 2025 NMSU College of Arts & Sciences S.P. Manasse and Margaret Manasse Endowed Fund Award.
- Mar 2025: Paper submitted! Led by Linn Eriksson, on how to form the first planets in the Universe.
- Feb 2025: Paper submitted! Led by Daniel Carrera, on a synergy between streaming instability and coagulation.
- Feb 2025: Attending conference Pebbles in Planet Formation
- Dec 2024: Attending conference Minor Bodies of the Solar System: Space Missions, Observations and Theory.
- Dec 2024: Story on Daniel Carrera joining our group, and our two new NASA grants, in collaboration with Jake Simon. I am institutional PI.
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 (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.