Quadry
Chance

Planet formation
in dynamic systems

I am an astronomer and NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center, working on the demographics of exoplanetary systems. The central question is what planetary architectures reveal about formation and evolution, approached through a combination of physical modeling and statistical inference on large survey datasets.

My dissertation approached this from three directions. I used N-body simulations to show how giant impacts and photoevaporation leave distinct demographic signatures on the population of small planets, with transit multiplicity as a diagnostic. I found that planets near the photoevaporative radius gap are dynamically distinct from their neighbors, breaking the "peas-in-a-pod" size similarity seen elsewhere and clustering near mean-motion resonances in ways that point toward a history of giant impacts rather than atmospheric escape alone. And I developed paired, a framework for identifying unresolved stellar binaries from Gaia DR3 radial velocity noise across tens of millions of sources.

My current work builds on all three threads. I am using the photoeccentric effect to test whether gap planets also carry elevated orbital eccentricities, the dynamical signature expected if giant impacts shaped them. I am applying paired to measure how planet occurrence depends on stellar multiplicity, quantifying planet-host binary occurrence rates at scale. And I am developing a paired-like classifier to identify binaries from Roman astrometry, extending the approach from radial velocities to a new observational regime.

The broader goal is to understand how the galactic environment (binary fraction, metallicity, dynamical history) shapes the planetary systems that form within it, connecting what Kepler sees in the solar neighborhood to what Roman will eventually reveal in the bulge.