Research Interest:
- Circumstellar Disks
- Polarization
Current Projects:
- GPI is a high-contrast, integral field spectrograph designed to image exoplanets and debris disk. The low-res spectrograph will aid in the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres, while the polarization mode will identify and characterize debris disks.
- Mostly I work on flux extraction from the detector into GPI cubes for both spectral and polarization mode. My work has also included analysing the microlesnlet PSF and injecting model disks using MCFOST into GPI data.
- λ Boo stars are Pop I, metal deficient stars with solar C, N, O, and S abundances. External mechanisms from ISM accretion to debris disks have been proposed to cause this peculiarity.
- To investigate the phenomenon, high-res spectroscopy and sub-mm excesses can be studied together to trace a causal connection, rather then just an inferred correlation.
Past Projects:
- HPOL is an optical spectropolarimeter which conducted a ~15 year survey of Classical Be stars from Pine Bluff Observatory. It's now at the Ritter Observatory located at the University of Toledo. WUPPE was a similar UV instrument used on board NASA's Space Shuttles Columbia and Endeavour.
- My participation has been writing IDL code to extract these data sets and remove interstellar polarization. New diagnostics were found to trace the mass-loss pattern of the Classical Be phenomenon.
