About me

I'm currently an Associate Research Scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. I work in the Space Physics Research Group (SPRG) on a variety of space-related research projects. One of my main research areas is the analysis and modeling of ARTEMIS observations of lunar-plasma interactions, specifically the lunar wake, lunar exospheric pick-up ions, and the near-surface lunar photoelectron sheath. I'm interested in these topics because contrary to popular belief, there is much that we don't know or understand about the Moon, and the Moon serves as a wonderful "natural laboratory" for a wide variety of basic plasma physics.

I also work in the field of interplanetary dust dynamics, and specifically focus on dust populations, dynamics, and fluxes in the outer solar system. As a graduate student, I worked on the New Horizons Student Dust Counter (SDC), which is an instrument that measures the density of interplanetary dust grains in the outer solar system. New Horizons had a spectacular fly-by of the Pluto-Charon system in July 2015. Using data collected both before and after the Pluto fly-by, I compare these measurements to dynamical models of how dust grains behave in the outer solar system, where a variety of forces (for example, gravity from the outer planets) perturbs the orbits of these dust grains. I also am investigating the influx of these grains into the atmospheres and onto the moons and rings of the outer planets, and how this influx might affect the outer planets.

My Ph.D. research was done at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder under the direction of Prof. Mihály Horányi, where I studied dusty plasma physics throughout the solar system. My thesis topic was specifically on the dusty plasma environment present immediately above the surface of Earth's Moon. I built computer models of the plasma environment on the Moon and considered how this might influence the dynamics of micron-sized dust grains present from the lunar regolith.

Feel free to check out my research and my publications and to send me an email if you have any questions.

A cool blog article about my experience on the New Horizons Student Dust Counter in the Washington Post.

My CV. My Google Scholar.