About me
I am a Buckeye Prize Fellow and Ohio State President's Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University. I received my Ph.D. in Astronomy from Columbia University in 2023, where my dissertation, Rewinding the Milky Way in Time, used large stellar surveys to study the history and evolution of our Galaxy.
My research connects stellar physics and Galactic archaeology. I develop methods to measure stellar ages from rotation, spectroscopy, and kinematics, and use those ages to study angular-momentum evolution, radial migration, and the formation of the Milky Way.
I am especially interested in stars that depart from standard expectations. Large surveys make it possible to identify rare systems that test our models and reveal missing physics in stellar and Galactic evolution. I am also interested in population-level studies of exoplanet systems and the stellar environments in which they evolve.
Exceptional stars, exceptional physics
Large surveys define the relationships we expect among stellar age, composition, rotation, and evolution. The most informative objects are often the stars that do not follow those relationships. A few puzzles I am currently exploring are highlighted below.
- Young high-α dwarf stars: Lithium can help rule out past mass-transfer and merger scenarios in dwarf stars, yet we find rapidly rotating, high-α dwarfs that appear genuinely young despite their chemically old compositions. Their existence challenges a simple connection between chemistry and age and raises the question of how these stars formed.
- Missing metal-rich giants: We find very few red giant branch stars above [M/H] > 0.4 dex, even though standard stellar models do not predict such a sharp cutoff. Determining whether this deficit is astrophysical or observational will provide a new test of stellar and Galactic evolution.
- Slow-rotating fully convective stars in Praesepe and the Hyades: coming soon.
Stellar ages
Ages are essential for placing stars, planets, and the Milky Way on an evolutionary timeline. My work combines gyrochronology, spectroscopy, and stellar kinematics to improve age estimates across different evolutionary stages, with a particular focus on calibrating gyrochronology for old, low-mass stars.
Public stellar-age resources
- GPgyro: a gyrochronology relation for estimating ages of partially and fully convective dwarf stars from approximately 0.67 to 14 Gyr, calibrated on a sample of roughly 100,000 stars. See the paper for details.
- Gyro-kinematic ages: ages for 29,949 Kepler stars estimated by combining rotation periods with kinematic and Gaia information.
- Spectroscopic ages and red-clump membership: ages for 64,317 APOGEE stars inferred from spectra using The Cannon, enabling population studies of the high- and low-α disks.
Galactic archaeology
I use stellar ages, chemistry, dynamics, and simulations to reconstruct the formation history of the Milky Way. A major focus of this work is radial migration: how stars move away from their birth locations and how that migration reshapes the Galactic disk we observe today.
I have developed methods to infer stellar birth radii, providing a way to connect present-day stellar populations to the environments in which they formed.
