I am a second-year Planetary Sciences graduate student researching under Kunio Sayanagi studying Jupiter’s atmosphere.

I earned my B.S. at the University of Central Florida. There, I worked under Dr. Joseph Harrington characterizing the orbits, mass, and atmospheric composition of hot-Jupiter exoplanets. Specifically, I worked to refine measurements for WASP-32b using our group’s photometry pipeline and the open-source radiative transfer code developed during my time with the group, BART (Bayesian Atmospheric Radiative Transfer). A paper detailing my work on WASP-32b is in preparation, awaiting the publication of the main papers on BART.

My current work focuses on the spatial scale of cloud features on Jupiter and how this measure varies by latitude on the planet. I hope to quantify the visual change from the banded structure near the planet’s equator to the chaotic, turbulent structure present at the poles using the JunoCam instrument in conjunction with Cassini ISS and New Horizons views. In addition, I hope to provide zonal and meridional wind speed measurements using these same datasets. Alongside this work, I also assist Dr. Sayanagi in Hampton University’s growing ground observing program monitoring Jupiter for asteroid impact flashes.

My research interests include exoplanets, giant planet atmospheres, atmospheric chemistry, radiative transfer, and planetary geophysics. I primarily work in Python and IDL and utilize methods such as MCMCs and machine learning in my research. In particular, I hope to apply image recognition techniques to the problem of identifying cloud features in large datasets automatically. I am also interested in automating the process of refining initial guesses and bounds when applying MCMCs to modelling problems.

CV: Presentations/Publications