I am a science operations scientist for the European Space Agency (ESA) at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I work on combining astrometric and radial velocity data to find promising candidates to directly image, and spectrally and atmospherically characterize any detections. I work on the Hubble Space Telescope STIS team and I am also a member of the JWST telescope scientist team, working as a project-level member on coronagraphic imaging.
I started my journey at the Space Telescope Science Institute as a European Space Agency Research fellow. Prior to making the move to the US, I was a Ph.D. student and then a postdoctoral researcher at Geneva Observatory, Switzerland, working on two large surveys to directly image exoplanets around young stars. The first one, called NACO-ISPY, is a high-contrast imaging survey of nearby stars with debris disks to detect and characterize giant planets in wide orbits, including 120 GTO nights on VLT/NACO (ESO, Paranal, Chile). The second survey, SPHERE-SHINE (SpHere INfrared survey for Exoplanets) is a large-scale direct imaging survey performed with the second-generation high-contrast imager VLT/SPHERE with 200 nights of GTO. In parallel, I was also investigating long-period planets and brown dwarfs by coordinating part of the CORALIE spectrograph survey for extra-solar planets using the Euler Swiss telescope (ESO, La Silla, Chile). These long-period radial velocity targets serve as ideal candidates for direct imaging, which allowed me to work towards bridging the gap between these two different detection techniques.
I graduated from the University of Sheffield with a first-class Masters degree with honors in Physics and Astrophysics. I spent a year of my Masters studying at the Australian National University, where I worked with Kepler K2 data to find hot Jupiters and Neptunes around young stars. Upon my return to Sheffield, I worked on a quantum physics summer research project, investigating cavity polariton flows. My final year Masters research involved producing theoretical binary star systems and calculating the resolution limit for detecting these systems, as well as producing models using Monte Carlo simulations to constrain the physical parameters of these systems.