Research

My research focused on stellar physics and stellar evolution. A summary of these interests and some possible future directions (as of late 2020) is available here.
You can see a full list of my publications on ADS or on Google Scholar.

I was a developer of the open-source MESA stellar evolution code. In addition to using MESA as a key tool in more than 25 of my own papers, I made significant technical contributions to the code and its infrastructure. This broadly beneficial work included overhauling some of the microphysics modules and leading the migration of the project to GitHub. I was also a co-director of the annual MESA Summer School and wrote significant amounts of documentation.

I earned my Ph.D. in the Physics and Astronomy departments at UC Berkeley, where my advisor was Eliot Quataert. My thesis concerned the long-term outcomes of the merger of two white dwarfs. It led to a series of papers that deepened our understanding of the types of remnants left by these mergers and their role in the formation of peculiar, hydrogen-deficient stars.

I am also particularly proud of my work on accretion induced collapse and on the synthesis of lithium in low mass stars at the helium flash.

The inlists from my papers using MESA are collected in this repository and/or posted on Zenodo.

I occasionally post the results of simple calcuations or links to code that I’ve wrtiten. I hope others find them useful.