About Me

I love solving mysteries about our solar system and making new discoveries using orbital dynamics and large telescopes. Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in Astronomy and Planetary Science at Northern Arizona University working with Professors Chad Trujillo and Cristina Thomas. I also received my PhD from NAU. My dissertation was titled Constraining Planet Location Through Gravitational Modeling and focused on (1) the relationship between Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects and a hypothesized distant giant planet in the outer solar system, Planet X; (2) improving the efficiency of orbital characterization for directly imaged exoplanets; and (3) exploring a population of active asteroids/comets called the Quasi-Hildas.

As an undergraduate, I majored in Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University (with minors in Math, Geology, and Spanish) and worked with Professor Jani Radebaugh on modeling the thermally driven migration of meteorites buried in Antarctic ice. I also worked to determine precise orbits for the moons of the dwarf planet Haumea with Professor Darin Ragozzine and developed curriculum and equipment for undergraduate physics labs.

I enjoy sharing my enthusiasm for astronomy with students through teaching, mentoring, and outreach. When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with my wife and two kids hiking, disc golfing, and playing board games.

Research

My research is currently focused on the study of active asteroids, a small group of asteroids (~50) that have tails and comae like comets. This work is in connection with the NASA Partner Citizen Science project Active Asteroids, where volunteers help us search for cometary activity in archival telescope images. Anyone can participate at activeasteroids.net and, so far, we have had thousands of volunteers make millions of classifications and over 20 discoveries! Here is a recent paper where I give details on one of our discoveries.

I am also a a member of NASA’s DART misson, where we hit an asteroid with a spacecraft to change its orbit. It worked great! With enough time to prepare, NASA could deflect dangerous ansteroids on colission courses for Earth. My part on the team was working with images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of during the impact. The observations were tricky becasue the asteroid system (Didymos-Dimorphos) was moving quickly across the sky and JWST had to move about 3 times faster than it was originally designed to go. I got to work out optimization of the data so we could reduce the noise as much as possible while still maintaining good time resolution. Right now, I’m working on comparing the comet-like tail that was produced from the impact with tails on other active asteroids. Papers on our inital results from JWST and this comparison study are currently in preparation.

Additional projects I am involved in include: the DECam Ecliptic Exploration Project (DEEP, an observation survey set to discover thousands of new TNOs (see the first of 6 new papers from this project here), searching for surface features on large TNOs using the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope, preparation for the Vera C. Rubin observatory through the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration, studying ways of placing constraints on a hypothetical giant planet, Planet X, orbiting deep in the far reaches of our solar system (see my paper here), and follow-up observation for discoveries of new distant TNOs (e.g., 2018 VG18, the seconod most distant TNO discovered so far).

For more information on my research, please see my CV and publications.