How do planets form? Is the Solar System a ``special'' place to live in the Galaxy, or is it a typical bunch of planets around an uninteresting star? What are the processes that govern how (roughly solar-type) stars are born and die? These are some of the questions that drive my day-to-day research in astrophysics, and they are the questions that drive my adventures in astronomical instrumentation.
Publications
The best place to read about my research is in the published literature:
All publications in Google scholar
Main Research Topics
- Technology to enable the search for habitable exoplanet and the search for life on other worlds.
- Interferometer design and optimisation, especially as lead of the Australian component of the Asgard project for ESO's VLTI, which is was inspired by the larger vision of the Planet Formation Imager project.
- Understanding how protoplanetary disks evolve to form both terrestrial and giant planets
- Galactic archaeology including cluster and young association formation using well calibrated stellar spectra and kinematics.
- Large telescope instrumentation, including high spectral (echelle) and spatial resolution (adaptive optics) instruments.