My Expertise
Astronomy, stars, planets, extrasolar planets, black holes, supernovae, galaxies, space
Keywords
Fields of Research (FoR)
Stellar astronomy and planetary systems, Galactic astronomySEO tags
Biography
I'm an observational astronomer with a particular interest in the history of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. I help to design and conduct large survey projects that determine the ages, orbits and chemical compositions for hundreds of thousands of stars. I use that information to identify stars that were captured from other galaxies, and to study how the compositions of stars change over time.
My Grants
2022-2024
A$700k,...view more
I'm an observational astronomer with a particular interest in the history of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. I help to design and conduct large survey projects that determine the ages, orbits and chemical compositions for hundreds of thousands of stars. I use that information to identify stars that were captured from other galaxies, and to study how the compositions of stars change over time.
My Grants
2022-2024
A$700k, Discovery Projects grant, co-CI, "Seeing Dark with Light: Revealing the Milky Way with Stellar Streams"
2022
A$1.75M, ARC LIEF Grant, co-CI, "MAVIS: A Revolutionary New Instrument for the European Southern Observatory"
2018-2020
A$380k, ARC Discovery Project, lead CI, "Tracing the accretion history of the Milky Way with chemical tagging"
2019
A$159k, ARC LIEF Grant, co-CI, "A dedicated telescope to study the interiors of stars from their oscillations"
2017
A$16k, UNSW Faculty of Science Research Grant, co-CI, "Model-based simulation and clustering of massive data from Galactic
archaeology"
2016
A$40k, UNSW Gold Star Award, lead CI, "Chemically distinct stars as tracers of Milky Way formation history"
A$10k, UNSW Faculty of Science Research Grant, lead CI, "Advancing Galactic Archaeology with statistical tools for group-finding in high-dimensional spaces"
A$550k, ARC LIEF Grant, co-CI, "VeloceCal: Hyper-calibrating Australia's Planet Foundry"
A$430k, ARC LIEF Grant (plus A$355k partner contributions), co-CI, "Australian Membership of the European 4MOST Consortium"
2015
A$15k, UNSW Faculty of Science Early Career Researcher Grant, sole investigator, Seed funding for development of "Chemically unusual stars in the Milky Way: tracers of Galactic history" project
A$760k, ARC LIEF Grant (plus A$899k partner contributions), co-CI, "Veloce: Australia's Next-Generation Planet Foundry"
2014-2016
A$347k, ARC DECRA Fellowship, sole investigator, "The GALAH Survey: A million-star exploration of Galactic history"
My Qualifications
- 2008: PhD Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of California Santa Cruz, USA
- 2001: BS Astronomy, University of Washington, USA
- 2001: BS Physics, University of Washington, USA
My Awards
- 2019-2022 UNSW Scientia Fellow
- 2014-2016 DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) Fellowship (Australia)
- 2010 MPIA-ZAH Ernst Patzer Prize for excellent publication by an early-career researcher in Heidelberg (Germany)
My Research Supervision
Supervision keywords
Areas of supervision
Stellar abundances, Galactic archaeology, globular clusters, machine learning in astronomical data analysis
Currently supervising
Ms Kirsten Banks: studying the physical origins of spectro-seismology and the 3D abundance profile of the Milky Way
Publications
ORCID as entered in ROS
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3430-4163