My mission is to experience and share the joy of scientific discovery with people of all backgrounds.  

I grew up in Rochester, NY, one of the cloudiest cities in America.  Although I knew I wanted to be a writer, I became interested in ground-based astronomy and spent the few clear nights dragging an 8" Dobsonian telescope into my parents' backyard, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Ring Nebula.  I learned about Vera Rubin at a summer camp and got the idea that I would solve the mystery of dark matter.

At Harvard, I got a taste for the excitement of research, thanks to courses taught by Doug Finkbeiner and Dave Charbonneau, as well as a summer REU in Nantucket at the Maria Mitchell Observatory under the directorship of Vladimir Strelnitski.  I did a project with Doug to search for signatures of dark matter annihilation in the Milky Way.  Realizing that my love for telescopes and data outweighed my need to find dark matter, I conducted a senior thesis to follow up Kepler's first exoplanets with ground-based telescopes under the supervision of Dave Charbonneau.  

I attended UC Berkeley for graduate school during the Kepler heyday.  Under the supervision of Geoff Marcy, I determined one of the first empirical one-to-one mappings between planet mass and radius that extended down to Earth-size planets.  As part of this work, we discovered the typical size at which exoplanets transition from having rocky compositions to thick volatile envelopes.  I also commissioned the Automated Planet Finder, a telescope on Mt. Hamilton that searches for planets every night without human aid, and I wrote several papers in which I determined the masses, densities, and compositions of planets in Kepler's multiplanet systems.  My graduate research was funded by the National Science Foundation and by Mr. and Mrs. Ken and Gloria Levy (pictured above).

I spent two years as the Trottier Fellow at the Institute for Research on Exoplanets at the Université de Montréal. While there, I discovered that exoplanets within a given multi-planet system tend to be the same size as their neighbors, and to have regular orbital spacing.  My co-authors and I describe planets following this pattern as "peas in a pod."

I was recently the Beatrice Watson Parrent Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, under the supervision of Dan Huber.  While there, I was the Principal Investigator of a multi-year joint NASA and UH Keck program to measure precise masses, densities, orbits, and interior compositions in Kepler's multi-planet systems ($3.2 million total value).  

In August 2021, I became an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame.  My current work includes studying the emergence of order and chaos (including the peas in a pod pattern) in Kepler's multi-planet systems with observational programs on large telescopes such as the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Large Binocular Telescope.  In the future, I plan to extend these projects using new instruments like the Keck Planet Finder and iLocator.