I am interested in better understanding the processes stars undergo in the early portions of their lives using observational techniques.
While we have a general understanding on how stars form and evolve with time, we have yet to understand in detail many of their observed phenomena at young ages (stellar winds, magnetic fields, mass accretion).
My current work focuses specifically on the circumstellar disks of young stars. I am analyzing high contrast imagery of nearby disks (e.g. AU Mic) to reveal the intricacies in their complicated structure and its time evolution. My work has also focused on better understanding recently identified "Peter Pan''-disk systems, which have observational evidence of harboring primordial gas disks at the surprisingly old ages of 45 Myr. Laos et al. 2022 analyzed Chandra X-ray observations to investigate the main suspected internal disk dispersal mechanism at work, x-ray induced photoevaporative stellar winds.
Overall, our results suggest Peter Pan disks may be a consequence of the low far-UV (not x-ray) flux incident on the disk in low-mass dM stars given their relatively lower levels of accretion over the course of their pre-main-sequence evolution.
B.A. Swarthmore (2017)
Ph.D. Vanderbilt (2021)
