I’m a PhD student at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam. My work is part of the project “Chronicling the Clouds: Chemodynamics of the most massive dwarf galaxies” and is supervised by Dr. Lara Cullinane.

Research Interests

Dwarf Galaxies

I am currently studying dwarf galaxies. My PhD project is about the stellar halo of the Large Magellanic Cloud. I will be isolating halo stars and chemodynamically characterizing their properties. Our goals are to assess the importance of different formation channels to the halo and to see how dynamical events have played a role in the evolution of the galaxy, primarily using stellar spectra from a new survey of the Magellanic Clouds with the 4MOST facility.

Binary Stars and Stellar Clusters

My master thesis at the University of Padova was on the binary star population of NGC 2158. I found that the binary fraction decreases as a function of the mass of the primary star, in agreement with the binary fraction found in the Galactic field. We also discovered an M-dwarf discontinuity in the lower main sequence, found for the first time in clusters. We published an analysis of the discontinuity, along with a refined analysis of the cluster properties, in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

I continue to collaborate with the GALFOR group at UniPD, including JWST Cycle 4 GO 8960.

Pickup Ions

I compiled a 20-year event database of helium pickup ion wave events in Ulysses data. Interstellar neutral atoms that enter the heliosphere are ionized and then picked up by the solar wind. They generate low frequency magnetic waves that can be found in spectrograms of magnetic field data. We’re also studying anomalous high-frequency signals in the data that may be due to spacecraft noise, thermal proton anisotropy, or other sources.