I am a graduate student at the University of California Santa Cruz in the Laboratory for Adapative Optics. I focus on extreme adaptive optics and high contrast imaging -- developing and testing the technology that will allow us to directly image faint planets near bright host stars with ground-based telescopes. The focuses of my PhD are predictive wavefront control, visible light adaptive optics, and polarimetric imaging of substellar companions. You can hear more about my real work on the Exocast podcast: Episode-73b. You can read more about my fake work on the impact of the Starship Voyager on planetary evolution or how to turn yourself into a sub-optimal modal control basis in my various April Fool's Day papers.

In my past lives I have been a software engineer in the Russell B Makidon Optics Laboratory, a member of the Wide Field Camera 3 HST Instrument Team, worked on transit spectroscopy, and developed exoplanet observation planning tools for the James Webb Space Telescope. A fascination with tools (both software and hardware) will always be a core part of my science.

I am queer and nonbinary. I think that queer identities should have a prominent place in the world of astronomy, software engineering, and generally in science. I organized an LGBT+ Astronomy Pau Hana on the Big Island of Hawai'i, served as a member of the American Astronomical Society's committee for Sexual and Gender Minorities in Astronomy, started Tufts University's chapter of out in STEM, as well as Space Telescope's LGBT lunch series, SpaceGAYs. Wherever I find myself, I advocate for queer people in astronomy, even if it's just through lunch.