work in progress

I am an observational astronomer working on problems in star and planet formation. Since 2006 I am leading the project SONYC, which conducts unbiased extremely deep imaging and spectroscopy surveys of nearby star forming regions, with the goal to find all young brown dwarfs and free-floating planetary mass objects. This project will continue in the next years with the James Webb Space Telescope and with Gaia. I analyse accretion and disks of young sources, with the goal to constrain formation scenarios for stars, brown dwarfs and planets. Using time-domain observations, I study rotation, surface properties, and the dynamical environments of young stellar and substellar objects. I am working with 8-m telescopes like the ESO/VLT and Subaru, with space telescopes like Spitzer and Kepler, with submm facilities like ALMA and SMA, with the robotic 1-m telescopes of the Las Cumbres Observatory, and with our local James Gregory Telescope, the largest telescope in Scotland.

Ongoing projects:

• Substellar Objects in Nearby Young Clusters (SONYC)
• Rotation of very low mass stars and brown dwarfs
• Time-domain Observations of Young Stars
• Spots and rotation in magnetic white dwarfs

If you are a student and want to do a project in my group, please contact me. I always offer summer projects in the research areas listed above. For possible PhD projects, see here.