I am a professor of planetary science in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.
I obtained my B.S. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 2004. While still an undergraduate, I worked part-time as an intern at the Space Telescope Science Institute; it was ultimately these summers (mostly spent in a basement lab with a soldering iron in hand) that convinced me to try a career in astronomy.
I graduated with a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 2009, where I did my thesis work, titled “Portraits of Distant Worlds: Characterizing the Atmospheres of Extrasolar Planets,” with Prof. David Charbonneau. I then spent two years as a Miller Postoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. I have been at Caltech since 2011. Banner image credit: Keck Observatory.