Galaxy formation and evolution

The Milky Way is the one galaxy we can study star by star. Every star carries a record of the conditions it formed in — its chemistry, its motion, its age — and collectively those records let us reconstruct how our Galaxy assembled itself over billions of years. This is the field of Galactic archaeology, and stars are the artefacts.

I use large samples of stars as tracers to understand how galaxies build up their structure and their chemical content over time. The detailed abundances and dynamics of individual stars let us identify the debris of accreted dwarf galaxies, map the chemical evolution of different Galactic components, and test how processes like radial migration and mergers shape what we see today.

Questions that drive this work:

• Can we use chemistry to tag stars back to common birth sites or accreted systems?
• How did the disk, bulge, and halo of the Milky Way form and enrich over time?
• What do the outliers — the chemically peculiar stars — tell us about rare events in the Galaxy's history?

This theme sits naturally alongside my work on stellar astrophysics and computational data analysis: you need good measurements for individual stars before you can say anything trustworthy about populations of them.