About Me
I am a PhD student working with Sebastian Marino and Sasha Hinkley in the Departement of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Exeter. My PhD consists in explaining and understanding the different morphology seen in debris discs by testing the different planet-disc interaction theories, and evaluating the role of planets in the truncation of discs. These discoveries will ultimately also test different debris disc and planet formation theories.
For my Masters, I worked on detecting transits of exocomet bodies with spectroscopy. I performed a systematic search for these exocomet transits using all HARPS data, and was able to define an exocomet occurence rate for such transits observed through transient absorption features in the ionised calcium doublet. If interested in the field of exocomets, I recommend reading Strøm et al. 2020. Look out for a series of more in-depth and up to date review papers on Exocomets, which are the work following an interdisciplinary workshop at ISSI Bern!
Research Interests:
Debris disc morphology
Exoplanet detection with direct imaging
Planet-disc interactions
Planet/debris disc formation
Exocomet transit detection
Other Interests:
Other than my interest in Astronomy, I have been playing basketball competitively for a large percentage of my life in national/county/university leagues. While doing my PhD in Exeter, I am involved with the Exeter University Basketball Club (Men's 1st Team captain 2024-2025). From 2017 to 2022, I was also involved with the Warwick Basketball Club, taking different positions as the years go by (Charity Officer 2018-2019, Men's Teams Captain 2020-2021, Advisor to the Executive Commitee 2021-2022). Additionally, I was a Warwick Sport Activator, encouraging other students to be more active, by running casual, inclusive and beginner friendly basketball sessions.
My growing experience in data manipulation has strengthened my interest in sport data science, especially linked to basketball.
On the side, I am familiarising myself with new analytic tools more specialised towards sports analytics (Coursera course if interested). Some of my personal side projects include trying to predict the winning team of future basketball seasons according to old data, or predicting future MVP/ROY according to archival data.
We aim to study the architecture of three debris disc systems: HD107146, HD92945, HD206893, that have previous detections of resolved discs with ALMA (Marino et al. 2018, 2019, 2020). These debris discs are, so far, the only debris discs to show a gapped structure. These gaps can be interpreted as signs of planet-disc interactions where Neptune-like planets could be causing such observed annular gaps. With JWST MIRI F1140C data (GO1668), we aim to detect these gap carving planets and when combined with the disc structure information, we aim to constrain both the architecture and dynamical history of these systems.
As part of my Masters, we developed a pipeline that searches for signs of exocomet transits in spectroscopy data. Being guided by the multiple exocomet transits detected around the archetypal star Beta Pictoris, exocomets can be identified by transient absorption features in specific atomic species, such as the commonly used ionised Calcium doublet. The aim of this project is to overcome the typical bias towards sample of stars with detected debris discs, and use the entire HARPS archive to build a large and more diverse sample of stars. The ultimate goal is to evaluate the occurrence rate of exocomet transits and possibly determine any trends in host stars.