About Me!

Welcome! I am a UCLA Chancellor’s Fellow. (This includes a UC hiring incentive, which means a UC campus would receive $485K support when hiring a Chancellor’s fellow as a new faculty member.)

I study whether different planets could have been habitable in their past by investigating how planets’ chemistry and climates evolve through time. Atmospheric chemistry is key to maintaining temperate climates and to synthesizing the building blocks for biomolecules, so much of my research studies photochemistry. I couple this chemistry with aerosols, climate, geologic activity, and surface-atmosphere interactions to learn more broadly how the planet environment evolved.

I enjoy using limited datasets to infer stories about a planet’s evolution. Examples of my work include using measurements of Mars’ in situ surface deposits and meteoritic isotope record to learn when early Mars hosted liquid water and what that environment was like. Other examples include using Venus troposphere-stratosphere measurements to understand gas-mineral (atmosphere-surface) interactions, and using exoplanet spectral measurements to study variability of the star-planet systems.

I love to share my enthusiasm for these topics with the next generation of scientists, and I have mentored 22 undergraduates on their own mentee-led research projects. This has led to four 1st-author mentee publications, a fifth in prep, and six co-authored mentee publications. Two mentees were named Goldwater Scholars for their research conducted in my group. In the classroom, I have given 34 guest lectures over the past five years. In 2022, I was awarded the ASCIT Teaching Award at Caltech (a university-wide award, nominated and voted on by students in the classes).

See Publications for PDF links to my recent papers.

I was a recently a NASA Hubble postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Before then, I received my PhD in Planetary Science from Caltech in 2023. I graduated with the Caltech GPS Research Award. At Caltech, I was a NASA FINESST Fellow and KISS Affiliate. In 2018, I received my B.A. in Planetary Science from the University of California Berkeley, and I worked on NASA’s MAVEN mission 2016-2018. I graduated with highest honors from UC Berkeley’s EPS department.

For a full list of publications, presentations, and seminars, please see CV.

When I’m not doing science, I like to dance ballet & swim.