Astronomer and Instrumentalist
I am an assistant professor at the Ohio State University

News

04.22. 2022 Congratulations to Avidaan Srivastavas for successfully defending his undergraduate thesis on differentiating partially- and fully-convective stars. 

04.18.2022 OSU Astronomy is now eligible to host 51 Peg b postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the Heising-Simons Foundation starting from 2022. 

04.08.2022 Congratulations to Anusha on winning a graduate scholarship from NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO). 

03.11.2022 Congratulations to Jared Kolecki on getting into the the graduate program at University of Notre Dame. 

03.07.2022 Congratulations to Caprice on passing her candidacy exam. The theme of her exam is searching for biosignatures in gas dwarf planets. 

03.04.2022 Congratulations to Alexander Stephan on submitting the paper on nodal precession of KELT-9 b and WASP-33 b. 

02.08.2022 Our paper on retrieving chemical abundances using spectra of Brown Dwarfs has been resubmitted. This marks the first time we can retrieve robust C and O abundances using high- and low-resolution data, a giant leap towards the era of the extremely large telescopes (ELTs). 

02.07.2022 I gave a public talk on SN 1054 and the Crab Nebulae to celebrate the Chinese new year. 

02.04.2022 I am so excited and grateful to receive the NSF CAREER Award to support my research in the search of biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets. 

01.11.2022 Congratulations to Caprice on getting the AAS FAMOUS Travel Grant and the Sigma Xi research award. 

01.10.2022 Some good news to kick off 2022. Kiersten and Romy are selected as NASA ExoExplorers. This is second time that two members from our OSU exoplanet group are selected in the same year. Last year's cohort included Caprice and Samson. Congratulations!

12.06.2021 Congratulations to Jared on getting his new paper out on elemental abundances of JWST targets. 

11.09.2021 Congratulations to Kiersten on winning the 2021 Beth Brown Memorial Award at the annual meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP). Her talk title is "Constraining Hot Jupiter Occurrence around Metal-Pool Stars". 

11.01.2021 Congratulations to Kiersten on getting the 2021 IPAC Visiting Graduate  Fellowship. She will be working with Jessie Christiansen on planet formation around low-metallicity TESS stars. 

10.29.2021 Congratulations on Anusha's new paper on KELT-9 as an eclipsing double-lined spectroscopic binary. 

10.12.2021 Welcome Marshall Johnson to our group as a postdoctoral scholar. He is joining us from the Las Cumbres Observatory. 

09.28.2021 Caprice's paper on detecting exotic biosignatures of gas dwarf planets with JWST has been accepted. Congratulations!

09.24.2021 See my talk at the ELT conference on new techniques and technologies.  

09.10.2021 Caprice's talk at AbGradCon is up on youtube. Congratulations!

09.02.2021 Welcome to my Stars and Galaxies class in the fall of 2021. We have just finished our first group project on candidates for dark matters. 

08.24.2021 Welcome Michael Plummer to our group. He is an instructor at the Air Force Academy, and will be working on simulating performance of future telescopes. 

06.27.2021 Jared and Kiersten's papers on searching for transiting planets around halo stars I and II have been accepted by the AAS Journals. Congratulations to both on the magnificent work two years in the making!

06.21.2021 Congratulations to Joe on his new paper on the Planetary Science Journal "On the Probability That a Rocky Planet's Composition Reflects Its Host Star". 

05.28.2021 Our proposal "Peering Into Alien Worlds: A Synergistic Astronomical, Geochemical, And Laser Engineering Approach To Explore The Habitability Of Terrestrial Planets" has received the OSU President's Research Excellence Accelerator Award. 

04.22.2021 I finished teaching an interdisciplinary course Planetary Science in Spring 2021. I have so much to learn from my co-instructor and co-course developer Prof. Wendy Panero; and I am so grateful to have 19 wonderful students from Astronomy, Earth Science, and Chemistry. 

04.20.2021 Congratulations to Caprice for wining the 3rd place and Anusha for getting the Honorable Mention at the 35th Hayes Research Forum. 

04.20.2021 We have the first light in the single-mode fiber nuller experiment in the lab thanks to the untiring effort of Colby Jurgenson. More to come!

04.01.2021 Our group has received a generous gift from Two Sigma to advance the research in exoplanets.

04.01.2021 Five OSU scientists including me gave a group presentation on "What is a resilient Earth?". 

03.25.2021 Congratulations to Kiersten for winning the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.  

03.01.2021 Congratulations to Caprice, Kiersten, and Romy for making the Two Sigma Diversity PhD Fellowship finalist. 

02.25.2021 Our paper on the rotation of WASP-33 b is now published on the Astronomical Journal. 

11.24.2020 The JWST proposal marks the end of the proposal season in 2020. I remain hopeful that something positive will come from 2020. 

11.13.2020 Some uplifting news in this uncertain and stressful time: Caprice won the 3rd prize in the BlackInPhysics 3MT competition; Joe's paper is accepted in PSJ; and my NSF proposals have been submitted. 

10.20.2020 Our paper on the dual-aperture fiber nuller has been published on the Astronomical Journal. 

09.02.2020 Our paper on chemical abundance of HR 8799 and planet c has been published on the Astronomical Journal. 
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08.25.2020 New semester begins, I am starting to teach Life in Universe. Check out here for my lovely students and their awesome designs of aliens.