About me:
I am a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellow at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center. I recieved a doctorate from the University of Minnesota Astronomy Department working on asteroids with my advisor Chick Woodward. My interests are in asteroid detection in both the mid-infrared and the optical and characterization of the Main Belt asteroid population as a function of scale height. My research allows me to use data from the Spitzer Space Telescope as well as ground based telescopes such as the Large Binocular Telescope.
I am also leading a comet observing program through Minnesota which seeks to characterize the gas production rates in Oort Cloud comets as a function of heliocentric distance from narrow band imaging. This data is also being taken in conjunction with imaging using the Sloan filter set to characterize the contributions of dust vs gas for future surveys including LSST.
Prior to coming to UMN, I attended the University of Arizona and graduated in 2002 with a Bachelors degree in Astronomy. Whilst there I worked with Mark Wagner on low mass x-ray binary systems and with the lovely folks at the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey doing the shallow K-band data reduction.