Graduate Student at University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory
I'm interested in the life cycle of comets, from activation in the centaur region through to their deactivation and dormancy among the near-Earth objects. My work primarily uses imaging and spectroscopic observations of comets, centaurs, and comet-candidates at optical and near-infrared wavelengths with ground-based telescopes, interpreted with help from laboratory experiements and orbital analyses. I plan to receive my PhD in Planetary Science in 2021, and I received by B.S. in Physics and Astronomy from the Universiy of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2017.
Most meteor showers are the leftover dust trails of comets, but the Geminds were made by (3200) Phaethon, a blue-colored asteroid. Is Phaethon really an asteroid, or is it a dead comet? What does it tell us about the Geminids?
The Centaurs are the progenitors of the Jupiter Family Comets, and 174P/Echeclus is among the strangest of them. It's prone to massive outbursts, which could help to understand how comets are built if we understood the processes that caused them.