Stars and planets have to come from somewhere. It turns out that there's a lot of very diffuse gas and dust free-floating out there in the galaxy - this is the stuff that over time condenses down and forms new planets and stars. This gas and dust is known as the interstellar medium (ISM), and I've spent most of my time in grad school trying to understand it.

In particular, my thesis work has focused on exploring a subset of this gas known as the Planck Catalogue of Galactic Cold Clumps. In short, this gas was found by Planck to be very cold and dusty, and thus these clumps could potentially be sites of future star formation. I'm investigating some of these clumps using a technique known as absorption line spectroscopy, in which light from a distant star passes through these clouds of gas, and the atoms and molecules in the gas each leave their own unique fingerprint on the resulting spectrum that we see. This allows us to determine what materials the gas is made of, as well as its physical conditions (such as temperature, pressure, etc.).

To do this, I primarily use absorption line data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope - since some of its instruments operate in the ultraviolet range, it is able to see absorption lines that would never be visible to a ground-based observatory. These absorption lines allow us to simultaneously probe both the gas and dust content of the ISM, as well as physical properties such as gas pressure. I've thus far received two grants to do this - you can read about them here and here.

Publication list (via ADS) can be found here.