About Me

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Previously, I was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. I received my PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics for the University of Michigan in 2018.

I study the evolution of volatile gas during planet formation. I am particularly interested in how environmental factors change the distribution of volatile elements such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen and in measuring fundamental disk properties. My research combines observations from the infrared to the millimeter, using facilities such as ALMA, NOEMA, and JWST, with physical/chemical modeling in order to constrain the timescales and mechanisms through which volatile molecules are processed.

Top: Evolution of planet formation and the regions probed by various molecules. Molecules written in black trace gas phase carbon, white trace carbon ice, and pink trace ionization. Bottom: Example model output in the new envelope+disk modeling framework. Millimeter observations inform the physical models. IR observations serve as a check on the chemical models. Models determine the chemical inventory available to forming planets as a function of location and time. (Credit: Kamber Schwarz)