Aloha!


I am a Brinson Prize Fellow working with the Galactic Center Group at UCLA. My main research interests are star formation and stellar populations near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. I often use high-precision astrometry and proper motions in my work.

I completed my Ph.D. in 2018 at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (advisor: Jessica Lu, UC Berkeley). For my dissertation, I used the Hubble Space Telescope to conduct a proper motion study of the Arches and Quintuplet Clusters near the Galactic Center, measuring their structures and initial mass functions. My master's project was the quantitative spectroscopy of resolved blue supergiants in NGC 3109, a nearby dwarf galaxy (advisor: Rolf Kudritzki, IfA).

I received a B.A. in Astrophysics from Williams College in Massachusetts. Through my undergraduate studies and internships with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center I became involved in studying the photometric properties of asteroids and comets.