Research Interests
I did my undergraduate degree in Astrophysics at UCL. By some form of luck Prof Giovanna Tinetti took a chance with me and gave me the opportunity to intern with her and her former post doc Dr Marcel Tessenyi with the goal of helping to develop the science cases for ARIEL and Twinkle, this fueled my interest in pursuing a career studying Exoplanets. I then went on to intern with Dr Mark Swain, Dr Robert Zellem and Prof Yuk Yung at JPL and Caltech to further work on exoplanet research, solidfying my interest in the atmospheres of these worlds. I completed my masters thesis with both Giovanna and also Dr Ingo Waldmann where I was performing retrieval analysis of HD189733b and studying the biases that can arise due to different forward models and also from combining data sets, I also performed some forecasting for JWST and ARIEL.
I decided to accept a position to study for a PhD at the University of Oxford to keep working on exoplanet atmospheres. My interests include:
- Understanding the impact that clouds have on the thermal emission of planets
- Developing effective techniques to better interpret future space based observations
- Understanding the biases that arise from inadequate modelling of atmospheres and the impact this has on the interpretation
- Understanding the global climate of planets by modelling their spectral phase curves
Working with Prof. Vivien Parmentier, Prof. Patrick Irwin and Prof. Suzanne Aigrain has given me the opportunity to explore these ideas.
Pride in STEM
In my spare time, I am a trustee for an LGBT+ charitable trust called Pride in STEM. We aim to showcase and support all LGBT+ people in STEM fields, for more information, see our website!
I have organised Out Thinkers events in Oxford and helped to organise others in London. These are events in which LGBT+ people in STEM can get together to showcase their work in a relaxed environment. This was birthed out of the desire to “Science up queer spaces”. To see some of the talks that have been given in the past, click here!
Our work has been internationally recognised. We have had articles written about us in Nature and BBC News. We have also been part of the development and organisation of #LGBTSTEMday which has had the support from a lot of science organisations including ESA and CERN.
