I am a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I work on time-domain optical photometry, or in other words, I study things that change in brightness over time. My thesis advisor is Matt Holman. My research exam advisor was Kris Stanek.

The open cluster M37 as seen with the 300 megapixel Megacam camera on the 6.5-m Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona. This cluster of stars is about 550 million years old and 5000 light years away toward the constellation Auriga. Clicking on the image loads a higher resolution version.

Projects:

• Deep MMT Transit Survey of the Open Cluster M37

  My thesis project is to conduct a deep variability survey of the Open Cluster M37. There are a number of people working on this project, including Scott Gaudi, Matt Holman, Brian McLeod, Kris Stanek, Joe Barranco, and Marc Pinsonneault. We obtained 20 nights of data with the MMT on this cluster with the primary goal of searching for transiting planets as small as Neptune. We are also studying the variable stars in the field of this cluster.
  

• Variable stars in M33

  I have been doing some work on a survey of M33 using the CFHT telescope (the project is led by David Bersier). There is a color movie of a portion of the galaxy constructed from this survey's data.
  

• Variable Stars in M3

  Another project I did some work on is to create a catalog of variables in M3 using image subtraction. The above link leads to the ftp server hosting the catalog. We have also created a movie of RR Lyrae in M3 which was featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day.
  

• Hungarian Automated Telescope

  This is a project to detect transiting extra-solar planets around bright stars with a netword of small telescopes run by Gaspar Bakos. My research exam project with to use data from this survey to publish a Catalog of Variable Stars for a region overlapping the field that will be observed by the Kepler Mission.