In early 2025, I released two paper investigating how two different mechanisms for how massive stars destroy the clouds in which they are born interact with one another. Stellar wind-blown bubbles (a focus of my previous work) and photo-ionized gas affect each other in complex ways. I developed a new semi-analytic model to understand this interaction, and then tested it with a suite of detailed numerical simulations.

At the beginning of my postdoctoral work I added magnetic fields to my simulations of stellar wind-blown bubbles. I expected this to be a relatively straight-forward addition with predictable beahvior. Instead, these new simulations lead me down a rabbit hole of questioning how well we can trust these numerical simulations to capture the complex mixing processes that occur at the interface between the hot, shocked wind gas and the cold, dense ambient gas. I demonstrated that this is a fundamentally unresolved process in current simulations, revealed by the dynamical role that magnetic fields play in suppressing mixing. Understanding the root of this problem is still part of my ongoing research.

In the middle of April, 2021 I posted the first two major works of my thesis outlining a new theory for the expansion of stellar wind bubbles from clusters of massive stars in dense, turbulent molecular clouds (the sorts of places where these massive stars form). They are now published in the Astrophysical Journal. You can find an abridged explanation of these papers in a Twitter thread I wrote when I posted them.

In March of 2019 I was observing at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. I was there part of a research plan looking for exceptionally strange objects. When you go looking for strange things, you end up finding some, not necessarily the type you were looking for.

Dynamical Friction is the strange process by which a massive body, moving through a 'sea' of lighter particles in space, creates a 'wake' of the lighter particles. That wake, formed through gravity, then gravitationally pulls on the massive body, slowing it down. We investigated how this process worked in a universe where dark matter behaves quantum mechanically.

The European Space Agency's Gaia Satellite has given us the first real picture of our Galaxy in motion. We used this excellent data to reveal the Milky Way's complicated past of galactic cannibalism.

When looking for small signals of the much-obscured past of the Milky Way's formation, it helps to use statistics. We investigate what correlation functions can tell us about the hidden structure in the stellar halo of our Galaxy.

When you are looking for changes to the physics of very weakly-interacting particles, you have to look for evidence on the largest scales.