About me

Hello! This is a work in progress, but here you can find a copy of my thesis, or click here for my CV (refereed publications listed at the end) as of September 2024.

I am an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Previously, I was a Hale Postdoctoral Fellow at CU-Boulder, after doing a brief postdoc at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) working with Prof. Pascale Garaud in the Applied Math department. I earned my PhD in Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working with Profs. Paul Terry and Ellen Zweibel (on plasma shear flows), and as an undergraduate I studied physics and math at the University of Oregon.

My research interests include astrophysical/geophysical fluid dynamics and plasma physics, particularly instabilities and the turbulence they drive in novel regimes, including under the influence of rotation, magnetic fields, stratification, diffusive effects, and phase changes. Such turbulence is found in a wide range of systems; examples of systems that motivate my work include stellar interiors, gas giant planets, protoplanetary disks, Earth’s oceans, and nuclear fusion devices. Turbulence can have profound effects on each of these systems, including influencing the lifetime of a star, enhancing the heat and salinity flux between different layers in Earth’s oceans, or reducing the efficiency of a fusion device. The important effects of turbulence on these systems makes simple, predictive models for the effects of turbulence very desirable. Thus, a big part of my work involves developing such models.

I work towards these models by using a combination of numerical simulations on supercomputers as well as analytical calculations. Ideally, one prefers a model from first principles that can be tested in simplified systems that are possible to simulate, and then extrapolated to realistic systems that even modern supercomputers can’t simulate. A recent, exciting example is the model for chemical mixing in stellar interiors I developed with UCSC Prof. Pascale Garaud and student Sam Reifenstein. As part of a team that includes lead developers of the stellar evolution code MESA, we are now implementing this model into MESA so that the broader astrophysics community can use our work to better understand the chemical evolution of stars.

Currently, I’m studying MHD turbulence driven by magnetic instabilities (the Tayler instability) in rapidly rotating, stably stratified cylinders. This is motivated by the Tayler-Spruit dynamo (TSD), a proposed form of MHD turbulence thought to explain the angular momentum transport in evolved stars inferred from observations, with potentially dramatic implications for the evolution of more massive stars thought to lead to neutron stars, black holes, and some of the fantastic observed phenomena broadly referred to as “transients”. Following my recent work on chemical mixing in stars, I hope to provide reliable, simple models of angular momentum transport that can be implemented in something like MESA, or predict observable consequences of DDC so we can identify which “missing mixing problems” are due to DDC and which ones require a different explanation.

I welcome participation from students. This kind of research is amenable to involvement from students with a variety of interests and backgrounds (e.g. projects with lots of programming vs little programming). If you’re a CU-Boulder student interested in working on this kind of stuff, don’t be a stranger! Please reach out to me at my email address [first name] (dot) [last name] (at) colorado (dot) edu.

In my spare time, I recently got way into windsurfing, and sailing more broadly, including keelboat racing, and sailing on 420s, lasers, and E-scows. When those activities aren’t accessible I have a lot of fun playing basketball very poorly, salsa dancing, and I enjoy a good hike or bike ride.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, some of the virtual talks I gave were recorded and are publicly accessible: Click here for a talk I gave as part of the Fluids and MHD seminar series at Leeds on fingering convection/thermohaline mixing in MHD, or click here to see a similar talk I gave to the Transport in Stars 2021 KITP conference. Click here to see a talk I gave about my PhD research to the Staircases 2021 KITP meeting (I’m the third speaker in the recording; note this was aimed at a high-level audience, so I skipped a lot of introductory material that I usually cover in talks). Click here for an asynchronous talk I recorded to introduce participants of KSPA 2020/2021 to myself and some of my recent work at UCSC (note this was intended to be very short and informal to serve as a baseline for subsequent discussions, not a formal talk).

Click here to see my APS-DPP 2021 poster on nonmodal growth in MHD KH.