Exploring the atmospheres
of distant worlds
Postdoctoral Fellow,
Trinity College Dublin.
Currently a postdoc at Trinity College Dublin working with Johanna Vos to explore the weather on distant worlds using JWST. I'm a co-developer of petitRADTRANS, and am using it to measure how the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and exoplanets change over time. In general I'm interested in pushing the limits of our models and observations, making use of new tools and methods to develop more efficient models in order to get the most out of our data.
Previously I completed my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, working with Paul Mollière and Laura Kreidberg, where I wrote my thesis on the atmospheric charactisation of directly imaged exoplanets. As part of the ExoGRAVITY team I used VLTI/GRAVITY in order to determine atmospheric properties and evolutionary history of the HR 8799 system. After the launch of JWST, I am particularly interested in characterizing atmospheres in the mid-infrared in order to better understand their cloud properties and dynamics.
I'm mostly interested in exoplanet observation and characterization, trying to learn about atmospheric composition and structure and what this can tell us about the climate and formation history of the planet. I have worked with both ground-based and space based observatories, and hope to continue to push the boundaries of our observational capabilities using next generation telescopes. In the long term we are working towards identifying biosignatures on exoplanets, but I'm also concerned with the biosphere on our own planet. I support Astronomers for Planet Earth, and hope to continue working to better our stewardship of our own environment. A full list of publications I've been involved in is available here.
I'm a co-developer of the petitRADTRANS package for calculating the spectra of exoplanet and brown dwarfs. We can use these models to infer the properties of their atmospheres, such as their temperature, chemistry and cloud structure.
As part of the ExoGRAVITY project, I explored the atmospheres of the HR 8799 planets. We found that their atmospheres may contain far more heavy elements than is expected for such large, gas-giant exoplanets. You can download the data and results from this study yourself on Zenodo!
High-contrast imaging allows us to take pictures of exoplanets near to their host stars. However, the processing involved makes it difficult to accurately characterise the atmospheric properties, so we studied how to optimise the data analysis to minimize these biases.
Apart from astronomy, I enjoy photography, making music, and being anywhere outside in nature.