I study the dust of the interstellar medium in our Milky Way. Dust is part of the life-cycle of stars, the stuff from which stars form and the stuff that is mixed back into the Galaxy at star death. I am especially interested in the dimming and reddening of background starlight by dust. My students and I use all-sky surveys and compilations of stellar photometry and spectra to understand the dust. I started by studying the interstellar dust at high galactic latitude through which we observe the universe beyond, but recently I have been using similar techniques with virtual observatory tools to study dust closer to the galactic plane near young stars and old clusters.

What interests me most is how the size of dust grains changes the wavelength dependence of the extinction. Clouds of dust with lots of small grains will be more effective at removing short wavelengths than clouds with typical distributions of grain sizes. Stars behind that small-grain dust will be more reddened per amount of dimming than stars behind typical dust. It is this variation in the conversion factor from reddening to dimming that continues to fascinate me.

See some my research products at Google Scholar or look me up with my ORCID.

I love Python and Jupyter notebooks! See what code I’m working on at GitHub.