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
- Sep 2025: Attending the Challenges and Innovations in Computational Astrophysics VI conference at IISER Mohali, India.
- Sep 2025: Story on our recent grant, written by Sarah Kimmerly.
- Sep 2025: Paper submitted! On the streaming instability clumping threshold, led by Jay Lim.
- Sep 2025: Paper submitted! On planet formation in AGN disks, led by Bhupendra Mishra.
- Sep 2025: Sabbatical at the University of Copenhagen.
- Aug 2025: Story on my recent paper, written by Sarah Kimmerly.
- Aug 2025: Grant awarded! From NSF, to study planet formation via gravitational instability. Co-PI Cassandra Hall from University of Georgia.
- Jul 2025: Attending the New Horizons conference for the 10 years anniversary of the Pluto flyby.
- Jun 2025: Paper submitted! Led by grad student Daniel Godines, on observability of streaming instability and the missing mass problem in circumstellar disks.
- May 2025: Paper submitted! Led by Jay Lim, on streaming instability models.
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.