I am a 6th year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Davis. I work with Prof. Andrew Wetzel as a part of the FIRE collaboration and use cosmological zoom-in simulations to study the formation and evolution of Milky Way-mass galaxies.
I graduated in 2019 from Bryn Mawr College, where I did research with Prof. Kate Daniel on the dynamical effects of resonances on stellar orbits in analytical simulations of spiral galaxies.
Outside of astronomy, I enjoy trivia, chess, skiing, hiking and spending time with my friends and cats in Davis and my family in New Hampshire.
Links to publications and CV
We compare the age-velocity dispersion relationships of stellar disks in the FIRE-2 simulations with literature observations of nearby disk galaxies, accounting for each works' respective aperture size, radial selection, inclination angle, and age-binning.
We assess how various observational effects impact the measured velocity dispersion in disk galaxies.
We compile observations of the Milky Way's age - velocity dispersion relation from the literature, and compare them to measurements for other nearby star-forming disk galaxies.
We study the kinematics of stars both at their formation and today within 14 Milky Way (MW)-mass galaxies from the FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations.
We quantify the relative importance of cosmological disk settling and post-formation dynamical heating on the current kinematics of disk stars.
We quantified when stars began to form with rotation-dominated kinematics. The lookback time that the disk began to settle correlates with its dynamical state today: earlier-settling galaxies currently form colder disks.