Stargazer. Kiwi. Geek.

Looking mysterious... Kia Ora - welcome to my little piece of the internet. I am a recently-finished soon-to-be-ex-Ph.D. student at the Australian National University in Canberra. My work involves finding and characterising the youngest stars in the Sun's (and therefore our) neighbourhood. By studying these stars we can hope to understand:

and much more. Now that I've finished writing my thesis, come 2012 I'll be off somewhere new in the world as a newly-minted post-doctoral researcher. Preferably somewhere with a classy bar that does a sublime dry martini. Job offers welcome!

November 2011 — Thesis submitted!
After 4 years, 7 months, 13 days and one mammoth all-nighter, my Ph.D. thesis, titled `Revealing the Chamaeleon: Young, low-mass stars surrounding Eta and Epsilon Chamaeleontis', has finally been submitted for examination. All going well it should be accepted early in the new year. Stay tuned!


September 2011, as seen in Science!
New paper: 'The Solar Neighborhood. XXVI. AP Col: The Closest (8.4 pc) Pre-main-sequence Star' accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. The title says it all!

Read about it here, here, or download a PDF of the paper.


February 2011, new paper! Things that go bump in the night: 'Episodic disc accretion in the halo of the `old' pre-main-sequence cluster Eta Chamaeleontis' published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Letters.

Download a PDF of the paper.


Artist's impression of a planet orbiting the M4.5 star GJ1214 (Credit: David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)



Header photo credits: Left: The most beautiful place in the world, the South Island of New Zealand. Christchurch (or what's left of it) is underneath the tuft of cloud to the North of Banks Peninsula. Middle: Open cluster M7 in Scoripus. Right: M16, the Eagle Nebula from HST, where stars are being formed as you read this.