Quadry
Chance

01

The Radius Gap as a Dynamical Fossil

The photoevaporative radius gap separates super-Earths from sub-Neptunes, but atmospheric escape alone cannot fully explain the population that persists inside it. Planets straddling the gap in Kepler multiplanet systems are anomalously size-dissimilar with their neighbors and cluster near mean-motion resonances, patterns more consistent with a history of giant impacts than with quiet atmospheric sculpting. Ongoing work tests whether these planets also show elevated orbital eccentricities using the photoeccentric effect as a window into their collisional past.

02

paired: Gaia-based Binary Detection

paired is a statistical framework for identifying unresolved stellar binaries using excess radial-velocity noise in Gaia DR3, providing probabilistic classifications for roughly 30 million sources. Its key feature is forward modeling: given a binary population, it predicts the observable Gaia signal, allowing demographic hypotheses to be tested directly against survey data. The framework has been applied in studies of planet occurrence, stellar populations, and galactic kinematics, with an extension to Roman astrometry in development.

03

Galactic Environment & Planet Formation

Planet occurrence correlates with galactic height in ways that metallicity alone cannot explain. One candidate driver is the evolution of the stellar binary fraction over cosmic time: close binaries suppress planet occurrence by up to an order of magnitude, and the binary fraction itself increases with decreasing metallicity. This project uses paired to test whether a changing binary population across galactic history can account for the observed demographic gradients, from the solar neighborhood out to the bulge.